tjaard.nl

Sometimes my mood is… not good. What else does someone need to get utmost irritated then? Well… sites that rely on proprietary plugins just to be displayed properly surely get on my nerves sometime…

At the moment of this writing, I am running a 64 bit flavor of Linux. I am quite happy with it and have quite some browsers to choose from. However, for none of these a Flash plugin is available. No problem, most of the Flash content I come across are advertisements anyway and I couldn’t care less about all those loads of games out there. However, some sites like Monitor Audio’s or Cheesecake Studio’s think it is perfectly acceptable to force the installation of a plugin onto their visitors. It is not. Be it Flash or Java, it is totally wrong.

People, think. Flash can solely be obtained from Macromedia, who basically decide who can use it and who cannot. People running another Linux flavor than i386 can’t. BSD users are excluded too. Perhaps some people did not like the licensing agreement and decided not to install the Flash plugin. All this severely constrains the idea of an “accessible Web for everyone” that web masters should strive for. Where standards compliance is a reasonable thing to ask of the visitor’s browser (as these standards can be obtained by anyone who is interested — including browser developers) requiring the presence of plugins is completely ridiculous and I sincerely hope that people will drop the “Flash is cool” idea and start learning decent css instead. I know that probably most people are using systems for which Flash is available, but I don’t care because it doesn’t change anything about the actual problem. Proprietary browser plugins suck. Period.

I do not have anything against the particular sites mentioned, I just happened to have recently come across these.