Two approaches to Flash

Posted Apr 6, 2007 20:52 UTC (Fri) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246)
In reply to: Two approaches to Flash by elanthis
Parent article: Two approaches to Flash

You are lucky in your friends, then. The vast majority of regular people who have no irrational, social, or philosophical attachment to a technology are going to (maybe) try Firefox, find out it doesn't work for some sites, and go back to IE.

There are more reasons to use Firefox than "irrational, social, or philosophical attachment." For me, it simply provides a significantly better browsing experience. Sure, every so often (and it's gotten exceedingly rare for me actually), I need to fire up IE for a site. Otherwise, I do everything in Firefox. Since all my bookmarks are here, my browsing experience is better under Firefox for a range of reasons, and it matches what I use under Linux, I think I have very rational reasons for not switching back to IE.

The same can be said about the free and non-free Flash plugins. I don't know if you've noticed, but ads and certain other content disable most of the options (such as "stop playing") in the context menu. That's actively hostile to users. There's no reason the free plugin should remove the user's ability to control it. But, if there's some site that has a Flash app that fails in the free plugin, then I don't see a reason not to have the non-free version as a fallback for that site.

And let's look at the dual-boot scenario. My wife runs Linux most of the time because it works well, doesn't crash randomly, and it works more like how she does. But, she'll reboot to Windows to play World of Warcraft. She doesn't stay there because she doesn't particularly like how Windows works. It's just a game launcher to her. It's not much different than having "game boot disks" 10-15 years ago... I don't think she's "lost" and she doesn't feel that way either.