Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 30th Apr 2008 17:40 UTC
While the technologies used on the web have always been mostly free, with non-free technologies delegated to non-essential parts of the net, this has been changing fast, lately. The popularity of YouTube has demonstrated the pervasiveness of Adobe's Flash, to an extent where not having Flash is one of the big downsides to any alternative operating system. And to possibly make matters worse, Microsoft is pushing its proprietary Silverlight technology. The founder of Mozilla Europe, Tristan Nitot, warns for "the dangers of the proprietary web".
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Member since:
2008-03-25
It's true the majority of Flash use is media related like YouTube. But then it's a little more than just playing media.
Let's take Youtube videos as an example. The video it plays is of course in the Flash piece. The video *control* is also in Flash. And at the end of videos, it shows related videos, or you can replay the video or share it, which are also part of the Flash.
Of course, you can do it another way with a change in design (in case of youtube, they really don't need to change design because all these functions are available outside the Flash piece), but then, that's their design.