My Website Still Uses Flash. Do I Need To Make a Change?

We will discuss reasons why you need to stop using flash on your website. In the web development world, Flash doesn’t get much love these days. There was a time when Flash was the hottest approach to websites, but that day has long since passed. Today, technologies like HTML5, canvas, and responsive web design have become industry standards.

Want a video or animation on your website? From 1996 up until about 2010, you probably would’ve looked no further than Adobe Flash. When Adobe released their multimedia platform Flash in 1996, it was revolutionary and changed the way websites looked and worked. Users had to make sure their Flash player was downloaded and updated and voila, animations and videos! It was really cool.

Do you need to stop using Flash on your website? In a word…YES. If your website is still using Adobe Flash for parts, or even all of that site, you absolutely need to transition away from that platform. Now, most people don’t bother making sure they have the latest Flash player updated and installed on their computers. In fact, users are encouraged to block sites that use Flash because of security issues.

The site CVE Details reports that 63 total flash vulnerabilities were found in 2011. The most common Flash security vulnerability being executable code, denial-of-service, overflow, and cross-site scripting.

Also, Apple led the movement away from Flash dependency back when they released the iPhone and later the iPad. Flash is terrible for mobile devices because it drains battery and eats memory, and of course because of the many bugs. Because of this, Steve Jobs announced his mobile products would not support Flash.

Flash is totally inefficient; Flash consumes a lot of power, slows down browsers and causes your computer to do a lot of unnecessary work. Mobile is huge now so the technology has to be light and efficient.

If your website uses Flash for an important feature or application, then the move away from this dependency may be a much bigger task. Still, it is no longer a matter of IF browsers will stop supporting Flash in the future, it is now a matter of WHEN they will do so, which means you need to take steps now if you want your site to be usable for the widest range of people in the future.