Zach’s ugly mug (his face) Zach Leatherman

Adobe Reverts Flex Store to Open Web

May 23, 2009

Warning

This article is old and may contain information that is outdated, irrelevant, or—dare I say it—no longer accurate. Read with care!

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.


Zach Leatherman IndieWeb Avatar for https://zachleat.com/is a builder for the web at IndieWeb Avatar for https://cloudcannon.com/CloudCannon. He is the creator and maintainer of IndieWeb Avatar for https://www.11ty.devEleventy (11ty), an award-winning open source site generator. At one point he became entirely too fixated on web fonts. He has given 79 talks in nine different countries at events like Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference, Jamstack Conf, CSSConf, and The White House. Formerly part of Netlify, Filament Group, NEJS CONF, and NebraskaJS. Learn more about Zach »

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