For many years Flash was a popular tool/format for putting animated and/or vector graphics online. Popularity has declined as the HTML5 standard has taken its place.
The death of Flash has come in stages and there are likely still more stages to come before it is truly dead. Let’s go over the timeline of what has already happened, what is happening now and where things are headed.
Steve Jobs struck the first big blow in April 2010 with a manifesto where he criticized Flash as being buggy and insecure. Adobe Responded with a post entitled On Adobe, Flash CS5 and iPhone Applications. There is no doubt that companies that once worked closely together had undergone a bitter breakup. iPhones and iPads stopped Flash support soon afterwards.
While Android devices still had Flash support for a while, that has also disappeared. YouTube and Amazon have moved away from Flash. Google’s Chrome browser pauses Flash ads by default. Yea! Firefox has encouraged developers to move to HTML5.
There are two critical tools we use in our business that run via Flash-based Web interfaces. They are often horribly slow and lead to browser crashes. I’ve communicated with both of the developers that I would love to see them move away from Flash.
That brings us to Adobe removing the name Flash from its Web animation tools. They will be known as Adobe Animation CC (released in early 2016) going forward and they still have the ability to create Flash files for the time being. Adobe has written a post titled Flash, HTML5 and Open Web Standards encouraging developing to move away from Flash.
Flash served a useful purpose for many years. It is now time for other methods to take hold and anything requiring Flash to go away. I can’t wait!
Flash is used in many image creations for large scale LED video displays. It’s small file sizes are a real plus and will be missed.
There are other technologies with similar small files to step in and take the place of Flash that aren’t nearly as insecure and unreliable.