Does Flash Really Suck This Much?

[elfs]

So, the other day I downloaded a flash that I don't pretend to understand since it's in Japanese and way too fast and uses a much larger vocabulary than what I've covered in Lesson 1-29 so far. But it was fun and the tune was catchy

Out of curiosity, I turned my attention to disassembling the flash and examining the contents and I discovered, to my horror, that the flash was full of jpegs and pngs that never appear in the actual video. It seems to me that the Flash compiler that Macromedia ships will blindly accept anything you add to the manifest regardless of your actual use of it anywhere in the driver script.

That's ridiculous. Especially since most modern compilers know how to dike out unused code; it should be obvious to a decent compiler, especially one that has to residence the entire object in RAM at compile time, that there are objects in the source tree that never get exercised, and should not be included in the distribution.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Flash does in fact suck that badly. And I'm noting in later versions the ability to have the downloaded file turn off various abilities in the player, including STOP. I'm seriously tempted to go around to all the machines I use and disable the damn thing.... I really wish you could turn plugins on and off at will in a browser.

[cabrius.livejournal.com]

There are at least a couple plugins (Flashblock and FlashClickToPlay or something like that) for Mozilla-based browsers that will replace any Flash sections with a placeholder, and then you can click on it to activate the Flash if you really want it. That might be close enough to what you want.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

This runs on Linux, right? (note the icon... no MSFT products here.)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Privoxy, the Linux-based privacy proxy with filtering, also provides this capability. It will block graphics and objects on a page that are, by the filter's table definition, spam or objectionable. You can always click on a blocked item and call it up, or toggle privoxy on and off completely, to reach pages that are blocked by your rules.