I work for a company that is really into Flash. And I mean really. They toss around phrases like “HTML is dead” and “freed from the ridiculous constraints of HTML” with complete abandon. They’re getting the shirts made. They say it in their sleep. Why? Flash looks pretty, and everyone has it.

I wonder how much longer this will be the case, though. First off: have you tried to install Flash recently? It comes with the Yahoo! toolbar which has dramatically increased the size of the thing. They’ve toned this down a little bit; if you have IE you can unbundle the toolbar, and I don’t think they include it in the Firefox download anymore. But this gave a lot of people pause. Its not too huge a leap from a toolbar you don’t want to GAIN.

Secondly, Flash is the tool of choice for people who really really really want to pop up ads. They’re pretty clever about figuring out if your pop up blocker is enabled, and using tiny flash movies to open pop ups instead of Javascript.

Thirdly, Flash ads are starting to stream video and audio to you without asking. Yeah, I have a broadband connection, and yeah, I can handle it, but I think its terribly impolite to push rich content on people who haven’t asked for it.

But finally: Flash can now track you, replacing those easy-to-nix doubleclick/adserve cookies. I have no doubt that the security sandbox settings will change in an upcoming version of the Flash player, but at this time all you can do is modify your security settings in such a way that legitimate Flash movies may break.

The net result of this is that the more savvy web surfers are using Flash blocking tools that require the user to specifically request a Flash movie rather than letting it autoplay. No doubt this technology will become more accessible, and thus more widespread, meaning Flash movies will be crippled in more and more browsers. What will happen the first time a client views their in-production site and instead sees an Adblock window? (Unfortunately, they’ll probably demand the developers find a way to circumvent it, and hopefully our account execs will sit down with them and explain the situation.) Will clients really want their sites built in such a way that users have to go through a number of deliberate steps to visit them? I hope that we’ll start to once again use Flash where it is appropriate instead of a catch-all for web-unfriendly design.

On an unrelated note: why are market wonks fighting with us to show us ads we don’t want? Do they really think eventually we’ll relent? “Okay, you’ve forced me to download 10M of stuff I don’t want to see, I’ll buy your car.” In contrast, last night I was reading up on Agile development. I clicked on about half-a-dozen well-targetted text ads for related projects, and even downloaded a demo of a tool I’d consider recommending for purchase. I’m not adverse to advertising; I object to being abused by advertisers.

UPDATE: There is now a tool in Firefox that lets you manage Local Shared Objects just as you would cookies. Go get Objection.