Flash Rules
I’m probably going to get in trouble for this, but I’ll let you in on a little secret. Your hatred of Flash is wrong and misplaced. I love web standards and I love the magical unicorn that is HTML5. I don’t hate Flash. Sure, I have my disagreements with it, but the “FLASH SUCKS” mantra that was spawned with the iPhone and only gets louder and louder these days is just silly. Actually, it goes beyond that – not only is it pointless but its actually hurting the JavaScript and development community at large.
I’ve been around the block when it comes to web development and I’ve witnessed this sea change first hand. I’m not going to go in and recount war stories, but I’ve had my ups and downs working with Flash and Flash developers. I can’t really pinpoint a specific moment when people started to question it, but I remember working on a site for a high end fashion client and seeing early versions of script.aculo.us and just being blown away. It seemed so simple: this animated dropdown menu didnt need to be designed and compiled in an entirely different environment! It could all be one thing. Sure the animation was pretty chunky and yeah it might have crashed the occasional Firefox, but it seemed like magic – and I wanted more. It took some convincing, but we started to build out more and more outside of Flash and it felt great. Then there was the iPhone, and soon enough it all seemed so repulsive. You mean, I can’t see what kind of noodles this Thai Fusion place sells!? argh. I dont know how Apple did it, but wow, what a spin. Instead of blaming the device, or even better, the authors of these restaurant’s websites – we all started blaming Flash itself. FLASH SUCKS became the new mantra and we all went along with it. Like an angry mob with iPitchforks we stormed Flash’s castle.
The result of all this yelling and vigorous finger pointing is in some ways what we all call HTML5. This glory train of hope, a beacon from a distant land where everything is a standard and you can order thai food from your phone. The hilarious thing however, is that as JavaScript developers the joke is on us.
Why People Hate Flash
Beyond the pure cargo-culting and the flash-blockers, some people at the heart of the argument do have their reasons. Lets take a brief detour from the main story to examine some of them.
It’s a proprietery product with a single owner
This is the con that most open source developers take issue with and something that hurts somewhere deep inside. As a very active open source developer, not only on my own projects, but as part of the community at large, I really don’t want to work on closed platforms. Since my first experience with open source and my first experience reporting, finding and fixing a bug, I haven’t turned back. Ruby, Rails, jQuery, etc. the benefits of open source are more than I can extol here. As a user, though, the core of OSS is transparency. It’s discovering a nasty bug and being able to effect change. This factor is obviously a range between projects but at some level, even if you don’t report a bug, it’s just knowing it’s there. It’s the knowledge that a community of people is willing and able to fix things. The lack of this is what instills fear in me when using software these days. As part of a team we’ve experienced bugs in Flash and reported them, and waited for a fix. When it’s something critical, sometimes you just want to be able to poke at the source. Even if it’s just to leave and say not my problem. I get this, it is a problem. I can’t really excuse this, other than saying that this same problem exists with most software and tools people use on a daily basis. Open Source is the exception, not the rule. Apple and the iPhone SDK is as much of a problem in this regard as Flash. Steve Jobs’ saying that they’re commited to open source and standards by supporting Mobile Safari and Webkit doesnt mean that the SDK or the tools to compile iPhone apps are going to be open source any time soon.
It doesn’t work on my iPhone
This is true, it doesnt and that’s a problem. In Steve Jobs’ angry missive he blamed unreliable performance and battery draining as well as other things in their lack of support for Flash. I have an Android these days, and it is slow, but at the same time, it’s pretty useful to have Flash running on the device. Does it drain battery? Probably? No more than watching a video or checking Twitter every 20 seconds. Clearly there were other factors at work there, and I’m not blaming Apple really. It is annoying that a lot of sites rely on Flash at their core (in part Paperless Post is not exempt) but really that’s an issue with developement practices, not with Flash or the device.
With or without Flash mobile is really a seperate concern. On mobile devices making something interactive, fast, and compatible is really the challenge.
(In fact Interactive, Fast, Compatible is really the CAP of mobile applications). Unfortunately the promise of HTML5 only sort of solves this at this point. Have you used canvas on an iPad? It feels like you’re running Flash in IE6 on a Pentium II. SLOW. Sure, there’s CSS Animation, but that really only takes you so far. I guarantee this will change in the next short while (years not months), but we’re talking about now.
It’s not crawlable by search engines
At its core this is true, but its just as true as with AJAX applications, as can be seen by the recent hash-bang hubub. With Flash or JS you have the same challenges and roughly the same solutions. The most complete solution at this point is just to make a mobile or JS and Flash-free version that the more interactive version is a layer on top of. The fact that your restaurant’s website doesnt have an HTML menu is not Flash’s fault, its the developer’s fault for not making it accessible.
Its slow and crashy and makes my fans turn on
Yes, there are slow and buggy sites out there. Yes a lot of them have .swfs on them. Is Flash as a tool and platform really at fault here? Flash openened up the web to interactivity, high quality streaming video, and robust applications. As a tool it’s very very powerful. With great power comes great responsibility. It’s pretty easy to invoke a memory leak in Flash and it’s up to the developers to contain and optimize their apps. Again, this is really a problem of education and the development community at large. The most common target of this complaint are Flash based advertisements and banners. So an ad for body spray takes over your page, and seems to slow your whole computer down. Thats pretty annoying. Well just wait for DOM/canvas based ads. They’re coming, and they’re manipulating your entire page and breaking your JS. Just you wait.
A couple of reasons to love Flash
At the same time, and despite all the yelling, there are some clear reasons to still love Flash. It was the first to do a lot of these things we now call HTML5 on the web. In many and maybe most cases it’s still better at doing them. In particular, while HTML5 video works pretty well on certain devices and browsers, it’s pretty far behind its Flash counterpart in terms of speed and general functionality. Fonts as well. One of the sticking points we’ve had at Paperless Post is the lack of detailed font controls and especially interactivity with fonts. Sure @font-face is nice, but it has its limitations and compatibility issues when it comes to pixel perfect rendering. Canvas fonts are even worse.
Flash is also pretty much everywhere. Besides the iThings, Android, your browser (every browser) its there and works almost exactly the same. That’s pretty sweet. It was one of Flash’s original promises and it still rings true (with one major exception). The proprietary thing also comes in handy in this respect, too. I’m not agreeing with it, but when a bug is fixed or a security hole is patched, updates come rather quickly to your end users. This is as compared to the wide range of browser release cycles.
From a development standpoint, ActionScript is close to something we know and love (presumably): ECMAScript. Newer versions have added more Java-like package management but a lot of the syntax (; and {}) et al will be very familiar. If you have only ever programmed on the Flash timeline, you would also know that most ActionScript apps are coded in a normal editor of your choosing and compiled on the command line. In fact, there’s a pretty cool project generation and build tool for ActionScript in Ruby called sproutes. Its syntax tends to lean more towards the Java and less towards the script, but it’s still very easy to pick up. In fact, I jumped in to one of our projects at Paperless recently and was able to code up a bunch of a module in a single day with only passing help from our resident AS3 expert.
There is hope: quit being an asshole.
That all is great, but it misses the biggest and best thing that Flash has – a thriving community of extremely talented developers. Its not uncommon to find a Flash developer at this point with > 10 years experience coding in Flash for the web. 10+ years! How many years have you been programming JavaScript professionally? For how many years has it been your primary focus? How many large scale interactive applications have you built? My guess is that the average Flash developer has built 20 times that. For good reasons. Not only have they had better tools for most of that time, but they’ve also been in heavy demand for that whole time, and building applications non-stop. Many of the challenges that JS and HTML5 developers are facing when building these large scale interactive apps, the Flash developers have already solved. They have those algorithms, that knowledge of 3D, that ability to turn code into motion and excitement.
As a talented Flash developer, you’re probably starting to explore the world of HTML5 and canvas and in some cases Cocoa and Objective-C. You’re starting to learn how to adapt your Flash expertise to this brave new world. In some cases you’re pretty put-off by the attitude of the JS community and its blind hatred of a tool and framework that you’ve devoted a portion of your career to up to this point. Understandably. A lot of these people are being assholes. If you devoted a lot of your waking hours to Java, it was and is really hard to want to ease into Ruby due to the bile and anti-you sentiment coming from the Ruby community. Over time, Ruby has adapted to its community and its forebearers (see JRuby).
As a JavaScript developer, it’s now your responsibility to stop the hate and welcome these super smart developers with open arms. Ask them questions, lean on them for advice, for hacks, for problem-solving. Hire them, even! They will appreciate it and they will blow your socks off. The best Flash developers aren’t tied to a language or technology, they’re just really interested in making awesome, boundary-pushing applications for the web. The fact is that they’re moving this way with or without you. If you help them, and respect them, and learn from them, your app and eventually the entire web will be a better place. If you shun them, they’ll just do what you do, but do it better. They’ve already done all the things that you’re trying to accomplish.
Flash isn’t going anywhere for a little while, and complaining about it doesn’t help. Instead let’s all quit being assholes and work together to push the open web and open standards. Most importantly, let’s learn from all our mistakes and triumphs and hacks and continue to make the now web more fun.
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Greetings,
I need to preface with the note that I don’t normally think of myself as a Flash ‘hater’. However, just writing this response has reminded me how frustrated I’ve been at Flash over the years. Write me off as an asshole, but my points are very serious underneath what humor I managed to include. :/
Semi-humorously, think of Flash as a dictator; it’s tyrannized the web for more than a decade now, with security holes, performance problems, breaking useful UI conventions, and littering the web with semantic black holes. Still, until an event caused the seething resentment to bubble up, we let it control our browsers, our pages, and our sites. HTML5 and the iOS systems have made us realize _we have a choice_! You’re seeing the rising tide of a decade of anger and frustration at Flash bubbling over.
Long before Steve Jobs, and iOS, many people who knew about these things blocked Flash at the least because of its security holes, slowdowns, and its persistent breaking of the Back button, and generally because Flash-based sites were substantially less usable than non-Flash sites. Between weird, non-intuitive controls and UI conventions (i.e. ones that are made up unique to each site) and an inability to find where you came from, unless the developer explicitly included affordances for it, and the inability to link to a specific place in…ahhhh…I’m going to stop now.
Perhaps Flash has its place. I believe we need to _stop_ thinking that said place is video, or decorated UI elements, or whole sites. I bet if we eliminated those uses of Flash from the web (impossible, I know), the remaining uses of Flash would probably be relatively performant and less battery draining/fan spinning. They would mostly be small standalone apps, games, and the like. Those are great places for Flash right now, while JS+Canvas gets better.
The REAL problem is that Flash has to be backwards compatible. It has to support a ton of REALLY badly written applications, along with those few brilliant sites you must have run into.
Your argument about the productive Flash programmers unfortunately rings false. I’m sure the productive COBOL programmers and their community were ‘put off’ by the attitude of the computing community as Y2K approached. That doesn’t mean that the community was _wrong_.
In all the years I’ve been online, I’ve never run into a site based primarily in Flash that was compelling. *I do not doubt that such a site exists.* I just simply don’t believe that there is this large community of Flash developers who have all built compelling web sites in it. That it has its supporters is no less relevant to its quality than that Visual Basic has its supporters.
So, in true tl;dr fashion, the reason people are being assholes to Flash now is that Flash has been an asshole to the web (user and development) community for more than a decade.
One-on-one, to a Flash developer, I’m happy to commiserate and be friendly and helpful in showing them how to do similar things in HTML5+JS. To the entirety of Flash developers and sites out there, I’ll reword Microsoft’s recent IE6 announcement. “It’s not often that we encourage you to stop using a popular product, but for Flash, we’ll make an exception.”
— Morgan
p.s. You have a duplicated sentence in your paragraph that begins, ‘Flash is also pretty much everywhere.’ I mention it last, because it’s the least important thing, but I thought it might help.
My point is that I don’t disagree that there isn’t a lot to hate about Flash, I just think that hate is misdirected at Flash as a whole and as a side affect at Flash developers. There are a lot of shitty flash developers and sites out there, but lumping them all into the same category, is like saying HTML5 sucks because someone wrote an infinite loop in their web workers and it crashed your browser. Rejecting a technology and community as a whole makes for slow progress in the web general.
I’ve been burned by Flash more times then I can count, as a developer and as a end-user. Thinking back on it, though, I’ve been equally burned by a lot of other technologies. At the same time, though, I can’t imagine what the web would be like today if Flash had never existed and came to prominence and if Flash developers werent willing to push the boundaries of what was possible in terms of interactivity on the web.
/ Also thanks for the catch – fixed
Hi, great post. I’m not a flash developer, nor have I ever worked with flash, besides editing someone else’s site. I have worked with html, css, js, ruby, etc.
I think flash should not be used in websites, unless its primary focus is to display “read-only” content. Otherwise, I feel you loose a lot of personal touch with a site in flash.
I agree that flash can be used for some fun games, restaurant websites, etc..otherwise no.
I love Pandora, but hate the desktop app. I hate that my CPU is always cruising at 50% when using it. Have you seen the iPad app for Pandora? Amazing. Better than the desktop app I paid for.
This post is so accurate and reflective of my own path it’s not even funny.
Coming from the digital agency realm, where Flash has been the enabler of super immersive, visual experiences for years, HTML5 feels like a repeat of Flash 6/8. And as you wrote, many of the same techniques apply, so tapping into existing experience is a great benefit.
Instead of hating on one thing or the other, let’s just all build some cool sh*t.
Nice post, I’ve wrote something similar a couple months ago as well (http://blog.millermedeiros.com/2010/11/why-the-html5js-community-should-respect-the-flash-community/), but it is also important to note that Flash developers have a lot to learn from the JS community as well (http://blog.millermedeiros.com/2010/11/a-good-flash-developer-cant-replace-a-good-htmljs-developer/).
Cheers.
YES! I whole heartedly agree.
There are a ton of sites that are built horribly with html, but we dismiss those as sites built by people who didn’t know what they were doing or a decade ago. But a site badly built in flash is quickly seen as the fault of Adobe.
Flash is responsible for enabling the web to move ahead. If we never had video capabilities, we’d never have gotten to sites like youtube or hundreds of others. Most of the things html5 is just beginning to promise us was experimented on and made possible through flash years ago.
I love HTML5 – don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think it kills or replaces flash, it does give us another tool in our belt that has more capabilities than html4.1. Flash will continue to evolve and when the standard for html5 video is finalized and all browsers support it, flash will still be pushing boundaries doing immersive interactive video and 3D rendering.
There’s no need to hate anything. Let’s educate though so as an industry we’re building sites/apps that aren’t horrid.
also – I love the iPitckfork idea.
Great post. Software isn’t really to blame as much as bad developers. It happens in every language. There are some things that flash does exceptionally well, and that html5 and css3 and all that stuff won’t catch up to anytime soon. Yes they may technically be able to do it but it will probably look like shit. Who knows though, things change so fast, maybe FLEX will overcome its bloat and prove useful beyond a rapid prototype tool. Sorry if you like it but it might as well be a microsoft product its so large.
Cheers
Great post.
I admire the new possibilities that come up with all the HTML5 canvas hotness, but so far when it comes to easy, tool integrated authoring of visual effects it’s not a competitor with flash, yet, I reckon.
Cheers
Wow!
Really nice.
Also, imo HTML 5 can never be used for games. V8 is kickass but u cant rely on performance of javascript engines across browsers.
You might also wanna add Adobe Mole-hill into the plus points.
Which security holes you guys talking about in Flash. i have been using Flash, and i am a Flash developer since the beginning, i never saw that, my computer get any security problem from Flash player / Flash app. The security model that Flash player is having is at the paranoid level. Still the player itself does not support drag and drop from desktop (security reasons- AIR does support though). HTML5 does support drag and drop. Will HTML5 is open to a security hole??
Whoever talk about Flash and bullshiting about how bad it is, don’t know anything about the Flash environment. It is that simple. You guys all wait and see when all these features in Flash implemented under HTML5, same security problems, performance problems will surface. Than at that point, who should you blame, which authority??
Html5 is great and Flash is going to be a great tool for generating content for it.
As a novice working in both languages, I think Thomas Fuchs sums it up best on how Flash Developers already solved the easing algorithms, (and many others that are universally applicable.) Although I will disagree when he says the languages are identical.
http://mir.aculo.us/2009/11/07/a-50-lines-of-code-javascript-animation-framework-say-hello-to-emile/
There is a great video presentation out there as well where he mentions AS and JS.
[…] QuirkeyBlog » Blog Archive » Flash Rules […]
[…] Aliás, vou deixar bem claro, eu não tenho nada contra o Flash, gente finíssima esse rapaz. Não vou entrar no mérito dessa briga sobre HTML 5 e Flash, não é o foco no momento. Recomendo pra quem quiser uma opinião bem sincera e interessante este artigo. […]
Great perspective article. Really enjoy reading a level-headed assessment of the current opinions surrounding Flash.
Flash, as a platform, reaches across a variety of devices and environments. It isn’t just ads, video, or even Web. A lot of articles critical of Flash never mention this. I’ve been working with the platform as my primary focus for over 10 years and have only made a banner ad with Flash once (and that was many years ago). Most of the Flash work I do these days for the Web is to build up modular functionality just not possible any other way. Most of my development projects are now done outside of the browser on desktops and mobile; all using Flash Platform tech.
HTML, on the other hand, is also beginning to seed across devices and environments. Already well beyond the traditional mark-up usage it was intended for. Now that HTML5 (along with CSS3 and JavaScript) is picking up some of the functionality that has been in the Flash realm for years- it can only be a good thing as choice is fundamental to the Web.
Flash developers have no need to worry as the platform has expanded to envelope much more than what it has been known for. HTML developers should be grateful to Flash for pushing the Web forward and encouraging growth in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s mutually beneficial 🙂
I’ll also note that most Flash developers are also quite well-versed in other languages and platforms simply because of the nature and history of Flash. We are no strangers to HTML!
Again, thanks for the balanced perspective.
With most of the mistakes in Flash repeatable in HTML/JS/CSS, the focus should not be on the whole Flash platform but the things specific developers are doing wrong. Example, Morgan complains about Flash breaking the back button, yet that is a problem that has been fixed in Flash for many years. It’s a problem that also pops up in AJAX apps, despite being fixable. What I’m saying is that it’s better to encourage all developers out of these bad design choices, pointing to Flash or JS libraries to enable to back button, rather than just hating Flash. Most of Morgan’s other complaints are not Flash complaints as they are things that can be done if they are done correctly. Blame the developer, not the technology and focus on best practices for all. As there are a lot of bad HTML/JS/CSS sites out there and there will be more of them as technology gets more powerful and the tools lower the barrier of entry to create content.
Also Flash aside, I never understood the hate for plugins in general. They extend the web, quickly adding new functionality to all browsers (even IE6) until that functionality is enabled into browsers. Often plugins show how things can be done where browsers can take the best from them and try to avoid any mistakes made. Example, Flash is now paving the way for peer-to-peer data, audio and video in the browser. You can create sound dynamically inside of Flash without any external audio file. HTML5 video still has a long way to go to catch up to Flash video (dynamic variable bit rate, support to reconnect if the connection is temporary lost, the mentioned peer-to-peer video and a lot more ) and the blueprint is there for browsers and the WHATWG.
As for the whole open argument, as a developer I’ve always felt I had more of a voice in pushing for the direction of Flash than anything inside the browser. For Flash, I just go to Adobe’s Bug & Issue Management System, make a feature request and ask developers to vote and support it. For HTML, you have to make your case to those at the WHATWG, hope it makes it into their spec and survives to the W3C and then hope that it’s a feature that Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera decide to all all to their browsers. Give me one dictator that is easy to communicate with than many dictators (only a few that truly open and listen). So yeah, the whole open argument never washed with me, beyond a very political position.
No need here to repeat what has already been said, and said again, and said some more.
But thanks. It feels great to see people taking onto themselves to defend what a great tool Flash was, is, and will be.
I have three points to make about the hatred towards Flash and why it’s completely misplaced.
1. Standards? Ha! This term is the biggest red herring I’ve ever had to contend with. How many different versions of html have there been over the years? How much does that number increase when you account for the different implementations that technology companies built into their own proprietary browsers? How much more does that number increase when you account for browser versions, OSs and now devices? “If it ships it wins.”, a phrase used by an html 5 book author. And the irony is that html has not “shipped” in a real practical way for years. As far as html is concerned the terms “standards” and “hack” go hand in hand.
2. Has it ever occurred to any of you Flash haters to ask, “Why is Flash everywhere?”. Flash’s ubiquity is due to its effectiveness at providing content developers and users what they want. Cool shit that looks and works cool everywhere. You “standards” preachers and advertising loathers need to get off your high horse. Stop lecturing to others and start giving them what they want. HTML5 is becoming more popular than any other version of HTML because its creators and users are finally starting to do that. I get sick to my stomach every time someone sends me a link to some cool, animated, rich, interactive piece of content built using HTML5 as proof of how much better it is than Flash and how it points to its demise. Not because they’re right or wrong but because of the blatant hypocrisy.
3. Anyone who thinks that HTML5, or any other technology for that matter, will solve the problems that Flash has are either liars or ignorant. HTML5 promises to provide developers a plethora of tools that give them even greater access to users information. In other words, it will create big security vulnerabilities. Combined with CSS3 it offers advanced capabilities for creating rich, immersive and interactive content. In other words, content that will drain your batteries and overwork your CPU. And as for those annoying banner ads? I wonder how those banner ad blockers will block those coming HTML5 ads without a way to distinguish between the HTML content you want to view and the HTML banners around it?
In the interests of full disclosure, I am a Flash developer. I make more money than the average html developer. I make cooler shit than the average html developer without needing a computer science degree. The things I make work the same way almost everywhere that I and my clients want. And my technology of choice doesn’t pin me to working only within the browser. If HTML ever provides me these things, which is still a huge question, then I’ll switch. In the mean time I’ll keep enjoying my cooler portfolio, healthier bank account and bigger playground.
Aaron
Question regarding FLASH and please keep in mind I have 0 (that’s a big fat zero) experience in working with FLASH. I am familiar with other languages both procedural/OOD(C++, VB. VB.Net) and high level/set based (i.e. T-SQL), I just have never worked with FLASH other than as a user experiencing the results.
My question is, and replies from anyone is most welcome, can Flash be used as a mechanism for interactive/dynamic reporting?
As an example, think of Crystal Reports or SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) where you connect into a data store, more than likely a traditional RDBMS like SQL SERVER (but a flat source like an Excel spreadsheet is not ruled out) , and return that data in a formatted report that is dynamic so that with the click of something on the FLASH animation the data can change without a request going back to the data store. Currently I mimic this in Crystal Reports by using multiple copies of the same report and just making the user think the report is dynamic in how it shows the data. I can’t get the report to dynamically change on screen but I can give the illusion that when the report is requested its appearance can change based on criteria provided by the users such as SUMMARY or DETAIL .
Ideally I’d like to be able to make a reporting mechanism that is fluid where in the presentation changes based on what the user does such as enabling/disabling certain options displayed within the flash animation, and so so with only 1 request (at the very beginning) sent to the data store. I hope this makes sense.
Thanks
BTW – As a FLASH user I think Jobs is being a, well a “Jobber” as I like to use the term. A Jobber is anyone who like Steve Jobs believes there you-know-what doesn’t stink and everyone else’s does. While I would not wish problems on anyone it was most satisfying when the crackers started attacking the “can never be harmed” Apple OS. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall Jobs found out that the days of his OS being safe from attack were over.
may be on 2004, Firefox firstever put an option to stop running any script in the page. As a vbscript and javascript programmer on that point i used to bang my head on the table, but then flash script came to my rescue. After a while both IE and FF started new funny thing “click to activate flash content”. Another nightmare. Then for the first time world was introduced to an amazing stuff: “the AJAX”. One thing became clear; now no one gonna deny running js in a page. But, that the old story. Now everything is different. I mean flash is being governed by determined adobe and for JS now we have more than AJAX the jQuery. Moreover, these two things are not one another’s enemy anymore. On my opinion programmer should harness the power of both the tools.
I loved the post even though I disagree with your core points.
First. Flash hasn’t been hated since IOS. Flash has been hated since 1996! 5 years? No. 10 years? No. Try 15 years.
Flash is a language used by advertisers to create annoying blinky crap. It’s still really great for that.
Flash support for multiple platforms is terrible and nothing can be done to fix it. My older mac laptop? Won’t run Hulu. I can’t run the latest OSX. Without the latest OSX, I can’t run the latest flash. Without the latest flash all I get is an error message when I visit popular websites. Throw away perfectly good hardware because flash sucks? Great.
“My older mac laptop? Won’t run Hulu. I can’t run the latest OSX.”
So Flash is bad because you can’t run the latest Flash Player yet you never mention that Apple left your laptop in the dust with their OS upgrades! This is where people turn you off Greg. The iZombie hypocrisy is incredible. Why not go complain to Apple that they don’t support your older mac laptop with their newer OS releases BEFORE you complain that Adobe doesn’t support your older outdated Apple OS X version?
Even if Hulu was html5 video (and they solved the DRM issue) do you think your laptop could handle decoding the latest streaming video codecs to watch it? Does your GPU have on board HW decoding for MPEG-4? My guess is no if it’s so old that current OS X releases can not run on it.
I’ve been working in the elearning industry for 11 years and produced tons of flash content that users learn from and none of it was “annoying blinky crap.” Also “Flash” is not a language, Flash is a platform that uses a language called Actionscript 3.