Today I feel like bashing flash.
While it's not exactly flash that I want to bash but more a behavior that is popular mostly
among websites made exclusively with flash.
So to all web developers/designers/clients or marketing zealots who happens to be web inept:
PLEASE don't put auto-starting music on your site.
It's a sure way to piss off your visitors because:
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your music choice most likely sucks, if not, it will be outdated soon enough.
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even if you put a bloody stop button you have to find it in the page, after you found which tab is vomiting the audio shit.
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even if we click the said stop button, most flash developers obviously don't have a clue of what cookies are and we have to re-click stop after each page load.
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if your visitors want to listen music they will listen their mp3, your site is not a jukebox. In fact they most likely already are listening music and yours is only mixing with it, creating an unbearable and unwanted musical chaos.
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except maybe if you're a band or something like it, it wont help to pass your message or sell your product. It will only bug your visitors to death. If it's the case, don't ever auto-start it.
So please, leave our sound cards and speakers alone. We don't want to hear your cheap audio loops and elevator music.
Damn that felt good :D
Finally, someone who can be bothered to speak out about this! Great post. Also, may I recommend FlashMute, a system tray app that can mute all flash, and all browser sounds.
right on! this is annoying just as much as the gigantic fast moving ads which I NEVER ever look at.. if I need something, I SEARCH for it. HELLO??? any idiots in the douche-keting department listening??
Wow, you took the words right out of my mouth. Nice.
You know what I hate more than Flash with music? Those banner ads that talk to you. Ugh. Nothing I hate more than when I trying to do work for http://ww2db.com , click around the web to do some online research, and hear "you may have already won an iPod!"
Nice post, particularly because there's no way to tell how loud the end-user's volume is set, nothing worse than accidentally blaring out loud crappy music in the office when you shouldn't be surfing the intertoobs in the first place. I would exempt sites catering to a specific band or style of music though.
A small number of web users, mostly blind people, navigate the web using software that speaks the contents of web pages. For these users "unrequested sound or video" of all types makes the web sites entirely unusable.
FlashBlock is your friend; one click to enable a particular flash item, two clicks to permanently white-list a site, and zero clicks to disable every stupid talking, singing or merely musical ad out there.
What do you mean finally? I was complaining about this on Usenet in 1997. The only difference is that now the designers of such sites should be even more ashamed with themselves.
firefox + flashblock
Love it
ok, now you got me going.....
how about the useless drum track some macdonald's for brains recording engineer throws over the great keyboard track because he thinks it "improves" the groove
falsh ads, i would happily shoot anybody who tries to steal my attention in such an obnoxious way
greed and ignorance, my god, technology amplifies everything...
most everything produced these days is not at all necessary, and has a huge cost beyond the euros purchase price, and that is time and attention and dumbness, so ubiquitous as to be nearly forced upon us...
try to do better, is all we can do, and think about someone else instead of how to screw people to build your bank account
good luck with that...
Welcome to 2001. It shouldn't need to be said anymore.
If you are using firefox, use flash blocker addon.
If you're running Windows Vista, you can mute just IE (or FireFox). Works like a champ! When you hear sound from a site, double-click on the speaker in the system tray, then mute the browser in the list.
Some of us have a kilowatt of subs connected to our computers, and at 2am when you are nearly sleeping on your keyboard and suddenly some page starts playing 'my humps' at volume 11, yeah i get pissed as would anyone.
well said!
Well said!
Now go shout it in their ears & keep on shouting it till they find the off switch!
Opera lets you turn off sound in web pages and enable them on a site-by-site basis. I do this with flash and java too as I absolutely HATE flash ads. I only enable plugins on sites like youtube.
While I totaly agree on the music rant, some sites live from ads, as a general rule (at least on the site I work for) bigger brings more money, and folks will pay extra for animated banners. As a I kid too hated the comercials in my sunday morning cartoons, but I don't mind getting to watch them for free. Just my 2 cents.
I actually run a second computer through my speakers to play music just for this reason.
... and on top of all this if your site plays music whilst I am looking at it at the office then I will close the window and NEVER VISIT YOUR SITE AGAIN! Thanks for making me look like a slacker in the office! - do you think that in effect insulting me in front of all of my work colleagues is somehow going to endear me to you and your site?!?!
Use Firefox with Flashblock to avoid the flash ads other crap created with it.
Last not least it is more than boring when you surf at the office.
finally, blah blah, shut it
Yes please. Its like having someone playing obnoxious music in the street outside your home - you may want to listen to that crap but I don't - that's why we have disturbing the peace. We need disturbing the peace policies for web designers that get them locked up in a room for 24 hours with Helmut Lotti playing at full volume
Damn straight, infact, best thing I have ever read on this here internet thingie...
In fact I go one step further, and plead with any self respecting web browser company (obviously everyone except M$) to PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE ADD A MUTE BUTTON ON THE BROWSER ITSELF, that way those of us here can browse without these annoying interruptions.
gigantic fast moving ads? Thing of the past with firefox and adblock plus.
Here Here!
This has been a pet peeve of mine for years, auto-starting sound is rude and downright horrible.
Kudos for using Django.
I use the flashblock FF plugin - disables ALL flash. completely.
And its got this nice little play button that you need to press to start any particular flash movie.
I agree absolutely.
I wish someone would tell MySpace about it. Obviously, if I'm visiting a band's site I probably want to hear their music, but I'd still like to choose when to switch it on. I almost never visit MySpace for that reason.
That said, I browse with NoScript, which you can set so that all flash is play-on-demand.
Hey! It's 2008, this was a problem like 5 years ago, i can't remember when i last visited a website with backgroundmusic last time. That, of course, doesn't mean that you should put music on your page but i don't see the point of blogging about the "problem" today.
You're an angry man. Watch your blood pressure! :D
I never really have to deal with this anymore via Firefox and it's extension FlashBlock https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433 which is great for avoiding annoying flash and saving mad system resources.
absolutely! and for other bothersome truths about web design: http://kenray.org/theanswers.html
Totally agree. Myspace player is my special object of hate.
Hey. I work for one of the worldwide giants of web development and some of the sites we make for marketing purposes use sound. Personally, I hate this for all the reasons you mention. But I'd like to elucidate everyone on why companies do it:
For those people who don't hate sound, they're more likely to engage with the site due to sound (which begs the question: how many people do we lose who DO hate auto sound?)
Audio creates a more immersive experience (e.g. try watching TV on mute)
We can charge out our sound development services (so it's another revenue stream)
It differentiates it from our competitors.
Marketing people (and CEOs) who are our main clients love sound because it makes their brand cool (and consequently discount the user annoyance factor).
So unfortunately auto-sound sites are the SUVs of web development. They're hideous in practice but appeal to a certain demographic.
argh, the ones that materialise right in front of the content that you're about to read! then they have the cheek to only be closeable if you can see the microscopic "x" in the top right hand corner.
last page impression i'll be putting there.
think it was a "new mini" advert.
Right on the money! Cain't wait to have more people on the same page. Funny thing, I'm reading this at about the same time I got an email from a customer asking to add music on their front page "that would be cool"...
Right-on
While this is true, often it's the marketing department (or the client) who mandates the music, not the designers. The designers (probably) find it just as abhorrent as you do.
Truth! I also detest when annoying Flash ads start emitting all matter of annoying, repetitive sound. I have seen some fun Flash auditory experiences, but in hindsight, they could've done a better job warning me there was going to be NOISE in advance.
Great post. the same happens with the autostart youtube movies
Sorry if it took a while to moderate the comments.. my site was overloaded by the all requests.. obviously I'm not the only one that is irritated by this !
btw Anonymous in london I love your comparison with SUV ahah.
Totally agree! I have experienced the two following scenarios: 1) I was listening to a low-volume track with headphones, so the main volume of the laptop was at the top; then I stopped it, and forgot about it. Later on, I came across a damned website with auto-starting music at a high volume! ouch! 2) The same, but without headphones, in the library.. You know, I got all that furious glances.
Amen, brother.
I'm with you man. I also hate web-music
http://www.juzamdjinn.blogspot.com
I also hate the black background / white foreground websites ;-) It is cool, but the rest of the internet (plus all your portfolio) is in the opposite way, and the sudden change make me feel pain in the eyes!
I hate sites that automatically play music. For some reason, I always seem to stumble upon them late at night when my volume happens to be turned up, and thus waking up someone, or while I'm at work and not supposed to be surfing the web.
let go for my page. Do you understand?
Myspace and facebook and similar blog sites are the worst. I can understand where it comes from though. The people who do this sort of thing have very little experience on the net. I remember way back in the day my signature file used to be huge. As I matured on the net my sig file got simpler and simpler. Now it's just my name and a url. Something similar happened with my website. The Internet still suffers from the endless spring of '96 during which a flood of newbies arrived far faster than they could be indoctrinated and destroyed the Internet culture.
Amen brother. I would go so far as to ask for no audio of any kind thank you. Give us the option of turning the musak on if we want to hear it. There's a button that will never be clicked.
rite on, rite on, rite on this is precisely the point. no freakin autostart!! thank you.
Absolutely correct. As for the post stating that marketing and CEO types love it, they need to understand that it only works in their own minds. It annoys people, it makes people so angry they leave the site and don't come back. People who make the decision to include auto-start musak have not done their research. I will not run add-ons to my browser - I will not come back to the offending site and I will certainly never buy a product or service from a company who has invaded my privacy.
Not only the music, but that annoying nasal woman who blurts out in a very loud voice "Congratulations you have been selected" for some scam or other. SHUT UP
Amen!
Along the same lines I wish to kill anybody involved in the creation of talking ads...I dont need some lady giving me a heart-attack just to tell me Ive won a free i-phone.
Couldn't agree more - look at this ranting lady talking about SMS text integation - scared the bejesus outta me! http://www.txtlocal.co.uk/sms-api.php
Man, with you all the way on that one. I've just stopped going to sites that have crap flash. Now if only they used flash like google's analytics?
I agree with the points presented. Thank you!
Do you know what else is annoying? If you write a rant to the world, at least check your spelling, grammar, and sentence structure.
I guess you're right mjt. My English is far from perfect, mostly because it's not my birth language. I'm really sorry if it caused you some kind of discomfort or something .. I work hard on this issue.
Actually this is one of the reasons why I chose to write in English. To improve. The other reason is because I don't like to talk about technical or computer related topics in French, let's face it French technical words sucks. I don't see myself using the word "arobas" to designate @.
So I hope that you somewhat enjoyed your visit and got my point despite my grammatical glitches.
Oh, and final note. I did not expect this post to be a hype at all..
Thank you so much for that one.. =)
From an end-user POV, I couldn't agree with you more. From a web, and sometime Flash developer POV, you're off the mark targeting "Flash developers" -- we make sites for clients, and are paid to do what they want, despite our regular insistence to the contrary.
Of the four Flash clients I've had in the past year (most of my clients go for CSS/HTML based on my rec), only one thought having music as an option was a good idea... everyone else has remarked "Well, if you only leave it on as an option, then chances are people will never know to look for it."
So lay off us developers -- I didn't pick my clients' taste in music, and certainly not their taste in color schemes :D My music is awesome, and never dates, bitches!
One of the Ten Commandments of the web.
I have walked away from flash projects over this very topic. I usually tell them to rip off someone with talent next time.
THANK YOU!!! I work for an internet company designing websites for customers, and I get so tired of having to explain why they shouldn't put music on their site. Just because they can, certainly does not mean that they should!
amen
We all have little things that annoy us... Personally I am annoyed with people who write stuff like "listen music" instead of "listen to music". But that's just me :)
I'm angry and I'm blogging
I develop flash sites, and the worst I had was a client who insisted on having his specifically-composed-for-the-site music blasting out. It was the most frustrating thing. I hate music on web. Sound effects annoy me often, too. I love flash mute, but this should be a part of flash player's right click menu. Adobe should have fixed that by now. The main issue with music, and particularly with flash-based sites is that people often open a few sites in tabs while waiting for them to load. Not only do you have to find the annoying stop button, you have to find the site in question.
I used to do an audio loop on my own website, back in the day when it was cool. I was young, stupid and didn't know any better. Auto-start audio on websites are now soooo yesterday, yet I still find those pages somehow, especially on MySpace, which seems to encourage it.
THANK YOU! sheesh, I've been saying this for years...
Great post, exactly how I feel about it!
The instant a site does that, I just click on Stumble! to get away from that crap. Far, far away from the d-bag that put music on his/her site. Thank you for saying it, and thanks to whoever put this on StumbleUpon. It should be required reading for web developers.
Stop your whining!!!
it'd be like knocking on someones door to ask them a question and throwin a mental cos the music they're playing is mixing in with your ipod... or gettin pissed at cars with phat mufflers for doing the same (actually that does piss me off)... or being in a library and someone is reading out loud and you gettin all narked at them (errm hang on I've gone full circle here)... Fkit yeh you're right!
...and another thing those Mosquito ads! what the fks up with those!
I Dunno I know you are all saying it's so bad but i really don't mind the music, sometimes it is even entertaining, like the other day I got one playing the theme from space odyssey. It's OK by me
Right on brother, let's kick those music auto playing flash dill weeds in the ass and bash them with something light and not too damage causing. man I want to punch the mailbox when that happens, except it's outside and right not it's cold. How about Winona Rider Playing Spocks mother in the new Star Trek. What a slap in the face to spok hu? jayexeter@jelia.us thanks for letting me rant, and great site
You so right. That "find the tab before you find the stop button" is a killer.
http://www.6000.co.za
I have to admit, there are few things I hate more than music that starts on it's own on webpages.
Stay away from the fat man
Personally I think you are a very rude person, who are you to say whether somebody cannot put music on a blog or web page. From http://thewhizzer.blogspot.com/ I will not remain anonymous why should I
@Anonymous
Who am I ? Well, just a rude person who occasionally use his blog to vent his frustration.
I don't impose to anyone to abstain to put music on their site, like I don't impose to anyone to read my blog. I just tried to give some real good reasons to not do it. Actually you can do it in a respectful way, without imposing it to your visitors, because that is rude sir.
Maybe my headline was rude, maybe I am.. I don't know.
Anyway, the web is based on the REST principle. While I'm not here to educate you about how the REST architecture is supposed to work, the general idea is that you request something and the server gives it to you.
When I request a site to gather some information and music start playing, did I really requested this music ?
I think it's has desirable has unrequested pop-up windows, but that's my very own opinion.
You can have yours and share them, that's why allow comments.
Cheers.
Nice post,
I agree i hate the auto start music sites, not only do they slow down the loading of the site but its annoying when you already have music playing,
Thanks for sharing,
Keep up the good work