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

Re:No, that is not a fact

[DrunkenPenguin]

Didn't you know that you can have Quicktime in Linux? ..Windows media too. It's called MPlayer and it can be reached here!
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Mozilla vs Flash

[axxackall]

Mozilla is the worst browser to run Flash plugins: it's crashing, it has problem wth sound, rendering and so on. Comparing to opera and MS IE. Besides, Flash works mostly on MS Windows and Mac OS. It's very crashy on Linux/x86. And you can forget about Linux on non-x86 platforms.

However, Mozilla has much better (potentially in some future) vector presentation technology: SVG. It's better integrated to HTML/Javascript code around it. And it's really platform independent.

I think that the day Microsoft buys Macromedia, Flash will dye for Mozilla and many Mozilla developers will switch to SVG. Which is much better than Flash.

Re:Who do you want to own today?

[Pope]

it just seems shitty when a big guy buys up a brand or name then tries to pawn it off as their own.

The way Macromind became Macromedia after they and Adobe split the Aldus software portfolio?

The way Macromedia bought Flash from Futuresplash?

Ask yourself whatever happened to Extreme 3D, SoundEdit and Xres...

Flash animations are ANNOYING

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't stand animated crap when I'm browsing the web.
If you delete libnullplugin.so then you no longer
get those windows asking you to install plugin xyz
either. The only thing that sucks is for stupid
sites that have splash pages that are flash and
no clear "skip flash intro" link so you can't actually
see any of the *CONTENT* of the site.

Re:Folks this is a rumor

[didlybom]

Cringely wrote about it a week ago, in his InfoWorld column. Still a rumor though.

Re:uh oh

[Anonymous Coward]

the player code is not open source, although it is avaliable for licensing.

the file format is open and avaliable. the specification for the latest version (6) is avaliable here:

you can find more info on both at:

http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/open/li ce nsing/

mike chambers

mesh@macromedia.com

EU Competition Commission

[l-ascorbic]

If this does turn out to be more than the regular rumour-mongering, it's worth remembering that even if a merger isn't blocked by US authorities, the European Union Competition Commission has shown itself more than willing to block deals like this that are so obviously anti-competitive. And yes, they do have jurisidiction over the deal, because both companies do business and have subsidiaries in Europe.

FLASH, and those who have no idea about it!

[PortHaven]

FLASH, is probably one of the best 10 web technologies out there.

Problem, is most people don't KNOW what FLASH is.

You all are downing FLASH, but that's because all you understand about FLASH is that it's an vector animation and presentation tool.

It is now, much, much more. It is now a dynamic data conveyance tool. It is a graphical object model that can potentially rival and replace HTML.

I could understand such comments when FLASH was naught but a simple "ooh/ahh animation" and "this is taking too bloody long to download".

But it's now advanced a far beyond that point. And is advancing further. I've observed examples of Flash tied to ColdFusion and SQL apps in which schedule changes were made simply by dragging and dropping the event on a different location. NO page refresh. The FLASH app went out contacted a ColdFusion component, passed relevant arguments, processed said actions, requested information, received it and displayed the updated information to the user.

All the user saw was himself clicking the event, dragging it to another day, and releasing it. Now that, is potential power potent enough to alter the web.

Yes, good utilization of FLASH is "rare". But if you see an application that uses FLASH to it's full extent, it will blow your mind. It blew me away. My jaw dropped.

In fact, a lot of people see the potential for FLASH to replace HTML on J2EE applications as the interface of choice. Further added improvement being the scalability of a vector based interface which can scale from desktop, to Palm unit, to billboard.

Re:Not the end of the world

[dryeo]

Is is impossible to turn of the Flash music that get enforced through my speakers

I don't knnow about your system but here (mozilla on OS/2) I can goto about:plugins, scroll down to the shockwave flash and click settings. This opens up a settings notebook where amongst other things I can disable audio, adjust the volume and pick out which audio device that flash uses.
Dave