OSNews

I know, This is a horrible idea... I'll never use this crap nor will I use Flash.

What will you use, and why?

The days of animated gif files are over.
There are no real alternatives to flash and silverlight.

Read up on silverlight. It's actually very impressive.

> Read up on silverlight. It's actually very impressive.

Silverlight is backend by MS.
Flash is backend by Adobe. Adobe don't have any problem with Linux. MS Does.

Sure I don't like Microsoft at all, but sometimes it seems that people critcize them for any stupid reason.

They're evil? Maybe, but let's not start a flamewar because of this.

Their products are crap? Idem above.

I think they deserve some attention, too.

Just my 2 cents.

Absolutely.

And they actually do come up with pretty decent products every once in a while. Visual Studio for one is very good.

They also have a history of good mice and joysticks...

Nothing is all black or all white after all.

-sarcasm on-
Good point, poor Microsoft does not get enough attention in the PC press already.
-sarcasm off-

"The current html+css+javascript+xmlhttprequest model is terrible for web applications and will hopefully be replaced by something more atuned to the creation of Applications not documents."

I disagree completely. Just look at all the Google and Yahoo apps. They look great (clean, fast, and simple), and perform great for web apps. Look at GWT. Look at all the powerful and easy to use DHTML/Ajax frameworks out there (Dojo, Prototype, YUI, etc).

Then look at all the websites that make heavy use of Flash, and observe how badly they suck ass (slow, bloated, unresponsive, irritating as hell, sucks up all the cpu cycles on the host system, can't be indexed by search engines, etc).

In my honest experience, websites, and web apps, based on HTML/CSS/JavaScript/XMLHTTPRequest are vastly superior to Flash based ones, by orders of magnitude. They are so much easier, more intuitive, more responsive, better looking. Of all the websites I regular visit, I know of no exceptions.

In fact, OSNews becomes much better when I enable the FireFox FlashBlocker add-on. Then that stupid add at the top of this forum can't slow the whole thing down anymore (as well as my whole system).

For things other than videos and games, Flash is horrible. An absolute abomination on the internet.

At least with Silverlight or JavaFX, they're based on true development platforms (.Net and Java, respectively), and can be used to make regular applications and UIs that don't suck up all the system's CPU cycles.