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Comment by zacharyb | Hacker News Reader

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zacharyb·

I have an idea, let's make the entire site using Flash, it will be super awesome!

cache:vastrm.com = "get adobe flash player"...

Fail.

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Yeah... we know... totally our bad. We were focused on scaling supply chain, mfr and coming up with great product. Unfortunately, made the rookie mistake of building in flash. That will change for sure. Sooner the better...

I would put that VERY low on your priority list (with the possible exception of the iPad impact). Don't let techno-elites drive you the wrong direction.

I'm not sure that people browsing on iPhones, iPads, and most (all?) Android devices in 2012 count as 'techno-elites'. The site should at least degrade gracefully to give an idea of what the company's about on Flashless platforms.

Doing it because they have a significant group of customers who can't access it: The right reason

Doing it because people on HN bitch and moan that the technology: The wrong reason

I'm all for dumping flash for the right reasons (and, personally, I wouldn't have built it using flash). Dumping it for the wrong reasons, though, is an unnecessary distraction that doesn't build business value.

I would put it high on the list. Building this thing in Flash in 2012 is just dumb. We saw how the launch went. As noted, their missing out on the tablet users. Building in HTML5 is not much harder (might even be easier). Flash is dead-end.

Agree flash is a dead end! And we will be migrating. However, we discovered the performance issues today were not caused by our flash app but due to config settings on our Apache servers. Again, apologies for the poor experience...

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