Flash blows

07 Feb 2006 One of the things I want to do this year is go to a music festival. The one I had in mind has a site at http://www.rockwerchter.be/.
So I go there, and to my surprise it runs some crappy flash intro page. I don't want this junk in my Opera browser so I start firefox because I installed some flashplayer in it for these special occasions (and to prove that even firefox crashes when using a sucky extension like Flash)

...

Nothing happens.
I get an empty page. How could this be ? Maybe because I upgraded to the latest firefox version (1.5) some time ago ? I check all menu's in firefox to see if I can look at what is causing the problem: nothing. No mention of plugins anywhere, nothing in the extensions menu.
So where is it ?
Anyway, I figure that, because I upgraded firefox, maybe I also need to upgrade the flash plugin. I go to the site for that and install it (after first having to figure out where to put it)
I close all firefox windows, start it up again, go to the site: nothing. Still.

Hmm interesting.

I start firefox from console, to see if it spews any errors. And indeed, it has some problem with the sound:


** (swfdec-mozilla-player:8464): WARNING **: No GConf default audio sink key and osssink doesn't work
Could not create audio sink


Whatever that means.
I kill off my radio-steam playing in the background and try again: same error.

Time to google. (realtime)
I find some reference to gstreamer-properties. When I execute it, it says I can chose between 2 audiosinks. Neither works.

After installing gstreamer0.8-artsd, I can chose "artsd" in the gstreamer-properties.
I ask for a test, but the thing crashes.

Anyway, lets see if firefox still does nothing.

Aha! it works now, although without sound, but who cares anyway ? I don't need to watch some stupid flash animation.
FLASH SUCKS

When are people going to realise that the internet is not a cartoon animation ? USE HTML damnit.

All of this just to see that the ticket sale hasn't started yet.

Flash just pisses me off. I believe everyone who assumes people want to look at pointless flash animations or "intro pages" should be shot.
Really, have you ever seen a useful flash application ? The ones I've seen are: games, intro pages or entire sites coded in flash.

Oh and if you read this and you made a c00l flash animation. DO YOU HAVE A HTML LINK TO YOUR CONTENT ?? The times I've had to look at the stupid flash intro just so I could click on a "skip intro" link. Or even worse, animations without "skip intro".

Should I name a few of the thousands of reasons why flash sucks ? First, you need a plugin that makes your browser crash 50% of the time. Next, you can't use the search function in flash. It is a proprietary format meaning you need to BUY software to make a flash animation and you need to reverse engineer a (possibly) changing fileformat to make players for it. You can't bookmark it and you can't print it. And most of all, I've never seen anything made in flash that's actually useful and couldn't have been made in plain HTML or in a java applet.

To my great disgust, the KULeuven is now recruiting flash-animators for god knows what reason.
I hope they won't start with this shit.