Being a web design agency.
It’s over 5 years since Flash was dealt a mortal blow by Apple, Wikipedia etc and some 15 years after we stopped using it. Now, Flash is officially dead.
It was hateful when it turned up in the late nineties and as a digital web design agency we had to use it. Adoption became universal in the following years and it underpinned everything from YouTube to banner advertising. It was awful.
The rise of mobile devices that cannot support flash is, I suspect, the last nail in the coffin (less than 10% of current adverts use flash) – but what’s surprising is how long it took to die. Until IAB’s recent announcement, flash was still the default media type for “animated” banners – but the adoption of HTML5 plus the resurgence of animated GIF’s has finally seen off it’s use in advertising. Annoyingly, not running flash on your device was one sure-fire way to avoid advertising crap and that’s not an option anymore.
It’s a concerted effort, a whole host of companies are simultaneously killing flash support, including Amazon, Google Chrome, Mozilla (Firefox) and Facebook. But not everyone has seen the (very) obvious writing on the wall – lots of big names such as eBay, Amex and HuffPo have been caught out.
Flash has been a pain in the butt for web developers, marketing agencies and end-users alike. It didn’t index well, often crashed browsers, killed battery life and left huge security holes. Good riddance.
