My post was more about correcting a widely-held fallacious statement, reported by several popular news sites. There are a couple reasons I felt it needed correcting. First of all, news sites should not be able to get away with making blatantly false statements. I find far too often that the “respectable” news sites fail to cite their sources and tend to pull their facts out of the air or, at best, from hastily-drawn conclusions. Meanwhile, less well-known sites like many personal blogs take the time to cite every single source with inline links and they are somehow considered inferior.

The second reason I felt a correction needed to be made was that the lack of correct reporting, particularly the lack of any statement from a popular news source that definitively stated the Gmail plugin needed Flash, pointed to a bigger problem. That problem is the reliance Internet users have on Flash. It seems that none of the news reporters had a browser around without Flash installed to test their claim. Why is this? Are we unable to use the Internet without a Flash player? That would certainly be a sad state of affairs. Where has the open Internet gone?

Furthermore, I could find no sites saying “I couldn’t install the Gmail plugin because I didn’t have Flash and I don’t want to install Flash”. As The iPhone blog points out, Flash is used a lot for annoying ads. It seems the people who might not use Flash for that reason just grin and bear it when Google tells them they need Flash. People should stop putting up with web sites that tell them they need Flash.