Microsoft To Acquire Macromedia?

perly-king-69 writes "The Register is reporting that 'industry sources' say that Microsoft have Macromedia in their sights. Whilst it could just be holiday gossip, if they do pull it off it could have a significant impact on the cross-browser compatibility of Flash applications."

Comments

Oh god. Help us.

[Anonymous Coward]

What ever will we do without flash? I mean, it works so well with Linux as it is, how could we possibly live without it?

Re:MacroMedia, Borland, Rational

[Lobo]

Yes they are innovative! They created the web browser...er...they created that really neat program Visio...er...they created the office suite...er...they created the GUI...er...

Where extremely annoying ads are concerned..

[ackthpt]

significant impact on the cross-browser compatibility of Flash applications.

This would not be a bad thing. Now to get rid of animated gifs, who do they need to buy up and lock only into IE to spare us from those?

In Other News. . .

[snitty]

. . . Microsoft plans to aquire the DOJ.

Re:uh oh

[rknop]

Does anyone else think that if this happened it would be the absolute worst thing that ever happened to the web?

No. A bunch of worse possibilities immediately leap to mind:

• The September that never ended
• Graphical mail clients with proportional fonts
• HTML E-mail
• the "blink" tag
• Web-based forums overtaking NNTP
• "WYSIWYG" (a complete misunderstanding of the web) page makers which write awful, awful, bloated code
• Telecom monopolies on the "last mile"

...but most of all....

• The introduction of Flash in the first place!

-Rob

Re:Not the end of the world

[override11]

Oh god, They will want to get rid of Coldfusion and replace it with ASP, NOOOOOOO!!!!!!

Re:Don't only focus on the negative!!

[b_pretender]

now, microsoft's "save as html" feature in word, excel, etc definately produces some cryptic, overly bloated, and nearly unusable html..
</i><img src="pix.gif" width="1" height="1"></p style="messy">

<content type="MSWord" created="Microsft" data="useless"><include stylesheet="useless_bloated.css">What are you talking about? MS Word's save is <h1><'/h1>HTML is how I learned to write webpages. </p style="mozilla_noncompliant">

Re:If Microsoft makes Flash proprietary...

[nizo]

Oh God please let this happen, if for no reason than to make Flash sites disappear.

F'n Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

The flash plugin is becoming about as necessary as the Comet Cursor plugin. It's about as useful these days, considering it's amazing capability to render transparent animations all over the boring content on the page. I swear, they will find me one day dead in front of my computer because of an aneurism caused by the extreme frustration and annoyance caused by Flash advertisements. In fact, the "Comment" edit box stops receiving text input every time the f'n flash Speakeasy ad at the top of the page rotates. GOD DAMNN!!! AAAArrrr POP ....

Re:Dreamweaver is the prize!

[GlassUser]

I don't understand what you're talking about. In my experience, Microsoft makes the best HTML editor hands down.

This page proudly created with NOTEPAD.EXE

Re:Dreamweaver is the prize!

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, if you're going to make a macho point about using only a plain text editor, you should at least use a real text editor such as editplus or textpad, or even metapad.