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.