The Null Device

Microsoft to buy Macromedia?

Oh dear; is Microsoft about to buy Macromedia, turning Flash into part of the vast, amorphous Lovecraftian blob that is Windows? Mind you, Flash is wholly or partially proprietary as it is, and most Flash content tends to be annoying ads which either obscure your page until you've looked at the stupid little animation, or else freeze your browser until you stop your MP3 player so the ads on the page can play their audio, so I turn it off. Shame about the few badly designed sites which require Flash to have a "cool" navigation experience.

There are 6 comments on "Microsoft to buy Macromedia?":

Posted by: cos http://polydistortion.net/monkey/ Mon Dec 23 22:15:27 2002

they fixed the audio guff in the Flash 6 beta for Linux - if it can't open the audio device, it just keeps going without sound.

(or so it says. i haven't verified this. the debian package has some thing to run mozilla/galeon through artswrapper, so i've never had any problems anyway)

Posted by: Graham http://grudnuk.com Tue Dec 24 02:38:42 2002

Well, Apple's also been on a spending spree of various k00l software houses. I guess Macromedia isn't k00l.

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Tue Dec 24 04:41:27 2002

They have Flash 6 for Linux? I thought they just did an old Flash for Linux and then gave up on it.

Posted by: alex Tue Dec 24 06:13:35 2002

flash is for psychos anyway

http://home.pacific.net.au/~ahw/fleabag.html

Posted by: mark http://cyberfuddle.com/infinitebabble/ Thu Dec 26 14:24:43 2002

I downloaded Flash 6 for Linux a couple days ago, and cos is right - the "freeze or possibly crash your browser whenever music and Flash play at the same time" thing is gone. Woopee!

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Fri Dec 27 14:06:41 2002

Cool. Now if you could selectively enable it for good sites whilst disabling it for everything else (i.e., those "Shoshkele" ads which go opaque over the page you're reading and force you to watch a stupid animation on why a certain car/credit card/lifestyle product is cool), I'd download it. As it is, I can live without Flash and run VMWare/IE if I need it.