Flash – Why?
While I was flicking through the presentation Rasmus Lerdorf gave (it’s on my del.icio.us links on the right) about PHP and performance, there was a section that involves the use of Yahoo Maps. All looks quite interesting, so I went to have a look at Yahoo Maps itself. Previously when I’ve looked at it, it’s looked very much like Google Maps. Somethings it did slightly differently, but it seemed to work well.
Not any more, because now I get a god damn flash version of it, and there doesn’t seem to be any option what-so-ever to turn the damn stuff off. Sure, I can click on “Maps Classic” but this takes me back to the bad old days pre-AJAX when I have the click around to see the rest of the map. Now, from what I can tell, you’ll only get served this version of the page if your browser has the Adobe Flash plugin installed, which is good. It means it’s degrades nicely. Thing is though, my user experience actually seems worse with the flash version – the scrolling isn’t as smooth, for example. I just can’t understand why anyone would go to the effort of writing something in Flash that worked better beforehand. Especially a company as savvy as Yahoo.
Flash is just bad news. Stick with AJAX – at least with that needs just a browser…