Thank god for flash ads!

written by Dennis on November 17th, 2010 @ 10:57 AM

Everybody seems to share the opinion that flash in the browser makes the web slower, kills your battery, crashes the browser and makes everything insecure. That slow animated flash ads come from the devil himself! Javascript is the way to go and so much cooler and faster and a standard and stuff!

A world without flash…

Don’t get me wrong, I love javascript! But let’s just imagine for a second that there was no flash, only javascript. You think the evil advert-creators would will stick with animated gifs forever and be happy with that? – Well, I don’t.

There’d also be animated adverts – with javascript and videos and whatever one can think of, but you know what? By the time being most badly coded flash animation runs smoother than most badly coded javascript animation (You don’t think advert creators will optimize their code, do you?). You get a bit of performance from upcoming hardware accelerated css transitions, and maybe WebGL in the future, but that’s about it. And I don’t want to hit the day when there are openGL adverts running in my browsers! You think having thousand of different javascripts running on each page is fast and secure? I don’t think so.

Evilness is out there

There is evil stuff around the web: adverts, click counting, measuring stuff, badly developed slow scripts… – all this makes the web experience worse. But those things would also exist if there was no flash. And at the time being it’s easy to block most ads with a simple flash blocker, because most ads are made with flash (hey, it’s easy and it tweens!). Simply unblock the few real flash apps you need and there you go with a “fast” web. Would it be as easy if there was only javascipt? How to separate the good scripts from the bad? Just pick one of your favorite web portal pages and inspect all the scripts that are included from lots of different sources that mess with the dom and the global namespace at this very day. You’ll get a headache (and so does your browser).

We’ll get what we deserve

There’s only one thing I assume for sure: Whatever programming language will be “the winner” in the future, we’ll get our ads and scripts and they’ll make the web slower, kill your battery, crash the browser and make everything insecure.