HBO's schedule

So I was looking through the online TV listings services, and noticed that HBO Signature is airing Doctor Dolittle next Sunday morning (January 22). The listings say it's the Rex Harrison film from 1967, but I remembered that the movie was remade some years back, specifically in 1998 with Eddie Murphy playing the good doctor. Curious to see whether the listings sites were right, I decided to look for HBO's own online schedule.

I probably shouldn't have. HBO's website is a Flash-based abomination. It took a long time for anything to show up on screen at all other than a black background. And then when I clicked on the schedule link, there was another long wait... followed by the browser window going completely black. No schedule whatsoever. As much as I've complained about TCM's schedule, at least you can actually access their schedule. Is this just a problem with using Opera? I'm loathe to download the latest version of other browsers just to keep up with sites that may be excluding the one I use on a regular basis, especially if the problem pages don't work well in other browsers.

And why do websites insist on making everything Flash-based in the first place? It's really obnoxious. I know there are a lot of times when I'm visiting a site and I'd like to open one link in a background tab while suring the main page. TV listings sites are a natural for this; I can right-click the link to one program and open it in a background tab to see what other times the movie is showing, while looking through the main listings for other movies I might be interested in. But Flash, as usually implemented, brings up the Flash dialog with a right-click, not the standard browser dialog.