Disable Flash for Oracle Metalink

If you want to improve certain aspects of Oracle’s new Flash-based Metalink, you can do so by disabling Flash.  In Firefox or IE you can disable Flash discretely; in Safari, you need to disable all plugins.

Once Flash is disabled, log out of and back in to your browser and go to http://metalink.oracle.com.  On the right, near the bottom, there should be a teeny-tiny, itty-bitty link that reads “Use My Oracle Support non-flash option,” which does not seem to appear when Flash is turned on.

If you disable flash, the Metalink notes are, in my opinion, much more readable.  They return to a plain HTML format, and hitting the browser back button simply returns you to the previous URL instead of re-loading the entire site as I’ve complained about before.

Clearly Oracle would rather we use Flash.  Immediately upon launching the non-flash site, a ton of information is missing from the front page and I’m sure many other features won’t work at all.  For me, depending on what I want to do, this might be acceptable.  Certainly if I’m just doing note research.

Whether I want to leave Flash off entirely is another question, one I will answer through trial-and-error in the next few days.