Another Web giant gives up on Adobe Flash

Aug 22, 2015 07:34 GMT  ·  By

The knife in Adobe Flash's chest has been pushed a little closer to its heart today when Amazon announced its plans to drop support for Flash ads on its advertising network.

When Steve Jobs first criticized Flash back in 2010, most of us considered him crazy, or having a secret agenda to wage war on one of the Web's most used technology, at least at that point.

Citing a lack of transparency, security issues, and performance black holes, Jobs' predictions slowly became a day-to-day occurrence with Flash, and now almost everyone seems to be on the "I hate Flash" bandwagon.

Default settings in Firefox and Chrome forced Amazon's hand

Explaining their decision in the Ad Specs and Policies section of their Advertising Platform, the Amazon Team says: "This is driven by recent browser setting updates from Google Chrome, and existing browser settings from Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari, that limits Flash content displayed on web pages."

"This change ensures customers continue to have a positive, consistent experience on Amazon, and that ads displayed across the site function properly for optimal performance," the Amazon team concluded.

This refers to Mozilla's recent controversial decision to disable Flash in Firefox for a few days due to unpatched security holes, and a previous announcement made by the Chrome team that plans to disable auto-playing Flash content to preserve laptop battery life.

HTML5 wins again

This new change will come into effect starting September, and should see most advertisers switch to HTML5-based solutions, Google already taking some steps into this direction.

While HTML5 ads aren't that prevalent, expect to see their usage slowly grow as more and more advertising platforms will drop them from their offering.

Practically you'll see the same effect in Web advertising, just as YouTube switching to an HTML5-based video player has slowly started to affect other similar video portals, with Vimeo, Twitch and Amazon recently announcing the same.