Flash

Oh my goodness! My morning was eaten up by capitalism, laziness and a really bad idea.

I will explain in the reverse order…

Bad idea

Flash animation! Damn that Macromedia! They come out and dominate the internet with their cute animations and everyone thinks it’s great. They go around and send their e-cards and make their cartoon movies until something truly cool like Mozilla Firefox comes out and flash doesn’t work. Why doesn’t it work?

Laziness

Corporations are happy with the way their product runs and they can not be bothered to make it compatible with other extremely popular software. Why?

Capitalism

They get money from the products that they sell, from advertising, they even sell help! They really don’t give a hoot about any of their free software. You can’t get one-on-one email help from them without a product serial number (from bought software). So naturally if you are battling with their inferior update and the archive players are “for developers use only” you really have no where to go except the forum. I did go through the forum for a while, none of those suggestions worked.
Next time you get a job (anywhere!) and they tell you it’s all about making the customer happy, I suggest you challenge them and enquire as to whether that’s really true or whether you should do the minimum amount of work to get the customers’ money.

My computer’s inability to view flash was brought to my attention by a couple of e-cards at Christmas time. In the end I completely erased all knowledge of Firefox from my computer and of flash player too and reinstalled them both. Happily they work together now. It’s still flash player 7 though, I wasn’t game to try version 8.

For those who enjoy tabbed browsing as I do, might I suggest that you try the Tab Mix Plus extension. I previously had it and Tabbrowser Preferences installed and I discovered that I don’t need preferences at all! Mix Plus does it all!