Some (legacy?) web applications written in flash (using Flex SDK for example) still require some time to download, considering that the binary of 2mb takes at least a few seconds to download, showing a splash screen to a user instead of the blank page would be much better than having user to wonder if the page/app is going to load at all, like in [1].

[1] http://www.socialexplorer.com/6f4cdab7a0/explore