It has become abundantly clear over the passed few years that the Adobe Flash is dying. Mostly, due to the popularity of Apple’s iPhone and iPad products which do not support it.
Apple aren’t the only company or people that are against the Flash Player: Occupy Flash is a website dedicated to the extinction of the software – and rightly so.
Having a website that is made partially or entirely out of Flash can be devastating to your users. Taking in to consideration the small percentage of people that won’t be able to view your website there is another not-so-obvious effect. Search Engines such as Google, Microsoft Bing or Duckduckgo can not read Flash, and if they don’t know what content is on your website then they can’t forward this on to potential visitors.
It’s also worth mentioning Flash is commonly used by companies to install malware on your computer. Malware generally sends your personal data to unauthorized parties. The best way to avoid this is to either update to frequently or uninstall it all together.
So what do we do without Flash? Well the web is ever evolving and with it comes new treats! HTML5 has it’s own ideas on how to implement videos, interactive animations and much more. It’s far from perfect, but the standard for HTML5 has not yet finished. This process could take some time; however, modern browsers offer many of it’s features already. Youtube already allows you to opt-in to their HTML5 Player. Many other companies are doing similar things for their own services.
If you have a Flash based website or project it’s worth taking a look at Google’s Swiffy project which convert’s Flash to HTML5.