Adobe Reverts Flex Store to Open Web

A few weeks ago in the process of doing some research about the Adobe Flex platform, I came across their online store, a dogfooded full page application using Flex.

This morning I went back to the same URL to find a site that was no longer using the full page Flex application I had been expecting. Instead it was now using native Open Web technology.

Naturally, my first assumption was that I had hallucinated the original research. But as it turns out, I wasn’t the only one that noticed the Flex application. This blogger complained about the accessibility of a full page Flash/Flex store. Another blogger had a similar complaint.

I have no idea how long the Flash/Flex Adobe store experiment went on before they changed it back. I’m just glad I’m not crazy.

Update: Turns out they are using a whitelist/blacklist of user agents to decide whether or not to show the Flex store. The original entry point above is incorrect, and shouldn’t have the html subdirectory. If you go to the site in Chrome, it will redirect you to the HTML version. My apologies, Adobe, although I do think the HTML version is much more accessible.