First, a brief eulogy on
4 Reasons Web Designers Should Kill Off Adobe Flash:
Adobe Flash, you brought us many years of Internet animation glory. Born the same year as myself, I grew up using you to play Oregon Trail and watch videos in the back of the computer lab while my teacher was teaching us how to type. I will forever remember the countless hours of my childhood that I spent with you as I waited for your websites to load, and the immense enjoyment I got out of your flashy [audience giggles here] animations once they finally did.
But now you must be laid to rest. I will forever share your story with my children in the same way my dad tells me the story about his first computer or the story my mom reminisces about how she used to make mixtapes using these things called “tapes.”
You will be missed, dear friend.
Okay, that may be a little dramatic and premature. But let’s be real, for web designers, their small business clients, and the rest of us honest, Google-fearing people, Flash might as well be dead. It once ruled high and mighty in the 2000s, but it’s been steadily declining out of relevancy ever since. And for good reasons.
– 4 Reasons Web Designers Should Kill Off Adobe Flash –
Security Issues
Back in April, 2010, Steve Jobs famously penned a blog post denouncing Flash by explaining why it would be banned on the iPhone, iPad and iTouch. This of course ignited a debate about whether Flash was really as bad of a technology as Apple said it was.
Five years later, it seems that Apple was right. In fact, on July 14, 2015, Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome browsers blocked old versions of Adobe’s animation software following news reports that hackers were using a security bug to take over people’s computers.
Adobe released a patch to fix the problem, but the damage was done. This is yet another anecdote that points to the security flaws within Flash, but security isn’t the only issue. Just for kicks, here are three more:
Flash redefines the meaning of slow.
Seriously, I might have loading screens permanently burned on my retinas from my time looking at them as a kid.
Flash takes up a ton of CPU usage, which makes it seem unresponsive and jumpy. And in order to even “load” Flash animations, it requires a plugin that has to be loaded and executed first.
There’s few worse things a website can be nowadays than slow.
Bad for SEO
How bad can a Flash site be for SEO, you ask?
Well, Flash content doesn’t have any URLS, it isn’t able to be searched or indexed, it uses unreadable text content and it doesn’t provide any way of monitoring outbound links.
In more layman’s terms, it’s just about as bad as it can get.
It literally doesn’t work on mobile devices.
Back in 2011, Adobe announced that they would not support Flash for all future mobile browsers. They were already banned from iOS devices, and it honestly made sense to refocus its efforts instead of trying to keep up with all the different Android devices.
Flash’s Last Breaths
Although Flash is dangling on it’s last thread of relevancy in the web design community, I will admit that it still has some practical uses. It still has great applications for game development and other multimedia animations, but as a whole, Flash should be thoroughly avoided throughout the web development process wherever possible. If not, your website (or if you’re a web designer, your client’s website) might meet a fate very similar to Flash itself.
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