What is so evil about a Flash based website?

Question

I have the feeling that Flash-based ( or Silverlight-based) websites are generally frowned upon, except when you are creating games or multimedia-content rich applications.

Answer 1

Many of us have had bad experiences with Flash based websites which has propagated the idea that flash is "evil". I don't really think it's fair to apply the label of evil to any technology or framework, they are each designed to cater to specific scenarios and many of them do well in those scenarios, for example, I have no problem with websites that use flash video.

A few other responses have touched on the fact that the use of flash contradicts many of the standard metaphors we use on the internet (e.g. links and navigation buttons), I hate this as much as the next web user but this doesn't really make flash evil either.

While it has been said that there are mechanisms within Flash/Flex to add support for these things, in my experience these are rarely implemented, which is not directly the fault of Flash per se, but is very annoying for the user.

Perhaps the evil is not Flash/Flex but Adobe for not making many of these things easier or more visible to developers.

For the record I have never developed in Flash