Future of Flash

Keep our offerings or not?

[Jon_King]

A significant part of our business relies on Flash and I cannot seem to get a handle its future. Mixed device support and ambiguity among manufacturers fogs the decisions for us.

Since customers rely on us for development decisions it is important we get this issue right. Your thoughts please, go forward or draw this product down?

[EvasiveAction]

Keep, flash will never die.

[Sub_Seven]

Huh... flash WILL be less and less needed.

Maybe for complex animations it can still be used but with the growth of HTML5 and JavaScripts libraries like jQuery the need of flash is decreasing.

Even though search engines poorly try to index flash content it is just not resulting and more and more people (devs) became aware or have known from day one the many cons and the few pros of using flash at all.

[Jon_King]

I have to admit not "allowing" Flash at this point in our site projects.... One of the first things a client looks at with their new layout is the display on an iPad or phone. Seems to me you are asking for trouble using Flash.

[rocknbil]

The usage of Flash and all the arguments for or against is historical, and I don't think any of this has changed. It's never whether or not to use it, it is, and always has been, **how** you use it.

Flash will be with us for a while. As one who's coded it extensively, there are things you simply can't do with other existing web objects. The problem again is HOW you do that.

Flash coders rarely pay respect to graceful degradation or progressive enhancement. A lot of Javascript coders are this way too, and their justifications for this usually border on laziness or blame (e.g., "the customer didn't want to pay for that."). Whenever you introduce anything outside plain old browser renderable (X)HTML output, you must insure whatever content is inside your widget is available WITHOUT the widget. Stick to this first rule, and your site will remain stable, with or without Flash (even on a Mac.)

An advantage to this - many visitors will view the less dynamic content and wonder how it would be with the bells and whistles, and are often prompted to enable JS or install Flash. So it's a good selling point. You put the effort in, it inspires the visitor to do the same.

The second aspect of how you use it has always been, and always will be not to use Flash if you can do what you're trying to do in some other way. Many of the things we do today with CSS3 combined with Javascript/jQuery, things we can now do with HTML5, couldn't be done before 2000 - things like animated buttons (ugh, anyway), mystery meat, forced navigation, graphic oriented full Flash sites (double ugh,) multi object animations that can't be rendered as animated .gif, and video. If there's one web widget that pushed Flash to the stage and made it a vital part of cross browser and platform compatibility it would be video. It was really the only way to do it without downloading a file compatible what whatever the heck you had to play video.

Now that we can do video with HTML5 (and Jobs vowed Flash will never be allowed on Macs/iPads,) we can start to eliminate video with Flash (or at least, eliminate it when the HTML5 draft is finalized in 2014.)

But that doesn't mean Flash is going to die, or be useless. There are still things it can do you can't do in any other way.

[topr8]

of course flash is great.

however as long as the iPhone doesn't support it then it is dead.

... the future of the web or at least a VERY big niche is with mobile devices of which apple dominate the market.

[mobilio]

It is not only Apple any more. There is no flash support in the new Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and nearly a week ago Adobe have unpublished the Flash Player from the Google Play Store. Flash is officialy dead, at least on mobile!

[brotherhood of LAN]

I implement flash very rarely, but one excellent use is shrinking images before upload to a server. Flash seems to be the best tool to use... and I'm sure there are many other examples where that's the case.

[unni6849]

Flash is the best 2D animation software available according to the latest technological trend.It is used to create animations for gaming,cartoons and flash banners for the websites.It is very user friendly compared to other 2D animation soft wares such as Flax,Swish etc.

[bhonda]

IE 10 Metro not supporting Flash unless it is whitelisted is a pain in the butt too.

It seems that Flash was to be dropped entirely from Metro, until that decision was changed at the last minute (which may explain why the silly whitelist exists).

I'd much prefer a clear-cut answer from the major players (MS, Google, Apple, even Adobe) about their future intentions - just a yes or no. Having to predict who is going to support what is daft. But that's not going to happen, really.

Until I get more confidence in where Flash is going (in terms of where it is supported), I'm trying to cut all ties with it.

Apple's trying to drop it. MS is trying to drop it. That's a pretty big proportion of the online world, right there.

My completely uneducated guess: Flash dead by 2015.