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4.9% of Websites Use Flash, Down From 28.5% in 2011 (bleepingcomputer.com)
Web makers continue to ditch the infamous Flash for other safer, improved technologies. In 2011, more than 28.5 percent of websites used Flash in their code, a figure technology survey site W3Techs estimates to have dropped to 4.9 percent today. BleepingComputer: The number confirms Flash's decline, and a reason why Adobe has decided to retire the technology at the end of 2020. A decline from 28.5 percent to 4.9 percent doesn't look that bad, but we're talking about all Internet sites, not just a small portion of Top 10,000 or Top 1 Million sites. Taking into account the sheer number of abandoned sites on today's Internet, the decline is quite considerable, and W3Techs' findings confirm similar statistics put out by a Google security engineer in February.
those sweet, sweet super cookies? Even Homestarrunner Abandoned flash and put their content on Youtube as videos (sadly you lose a lot of in interactivity).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Taking a long to die though.
Once technology breaks the 1% market share. It will take a lot of effort to actually kill such technology.
They are still people making programs and hardware for the Commodore 64 and other vintage systems such as Apple ][.
The main rule of thumb, if you are making a new site, don't use flash, if you expect the general public to use your existing site, replace flash. However if your site, wasn't flash users, who has flash on Virtual Machines, or legacy systems. Then they will keep it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I don't gripe so much when I come across a "legacy" usage, something that's obviously been around for years. I recognize how it can be difficult to get the bosses to spend money to "fix what ain't broke" in their eyes.
But recently I went for the first time to try out Comcast's site where you can remote control your DVR. That is a pretty new site, definitely just the last few years, and of course it's all built on Flash. For a huge corp with lots of resources to make such a decision just baffles me.
Because that's the only place.... my friend.... sees flash these days.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I realize many want flash to disappear as soon as possible, and i won't make myself popular when i say 'too bad it'll go, it has it's uses'.
For video we (finally) have some workable alternatives. But for a lot of online games, and some educational or engineering tools, flash still rocks. HTML5, webasm or your favorite game engine exported to html5/webasm usually have big performance issues and 'weird bugs'. Flash just-works and has its uses.
Yes, some websites abused flash, up to the point of making dozens of navigation buttons as flash content, giving it a bad reputation. And of course, it's been haunted by security issues.
Don't get me wrong. I'm happy html5 is here. I do hate installing/updating flash plugins. But i also do think it has some valid use cases, not in the last place legacy support.
There's a html5 version but it's not official.
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
HTML5 *almost* replaced Flash while having only a subset of the capabilities. Flash was used mostly for video playback. At this point, HTML5 video playback is easier than Flash playback. But Flash is still really nice for animations and video games, and I bet that is the majority of what is left.
Flash had a concept of frames and sprites. It let you make vector drawings on a frame and do automatic "tweening" between them. You could even make a game with almost no coding. Can someone tell me: What toolkits exist today that have the capabilities of Flash, but export to HTML5? I am disappointed tat Flash -> JS+HTML5 converters never matured, and that Adobe didn't adapt their Flash tools to export to JS+HTML5. It really was a great tool.
MIT's Scratch still uses Flash. :-(
However if your site, wasn't flash users, who has flash on Virtual Machines, or legacy systems. Then they will keep it.
In a world full of bad english, I just wanted to applaud somebody for taking the time to fully master the language. You, sir, are that person.
it's the apps / 3rd party stuff that locks it to IE6
I am disappointed [...] that Adobe didn't adapt their Flash tools to export to JS+HTML5.
When Adobe Flash became Adobe Animate, it gained an HTML5 exporter. But you can't buy a license to keep; you can only rent it.
education software uses flash and other plug ins
You poor fools who have loaded in all the 'new' browser tech and locked yourselves out of HOME SHEEP HOME have no one to blame but yourselves.
You thought that dislike for Flash was trendy. "HTML5 is better!" you said,
even when HTML5 couldn't wipe its own arse at a decent frame rate.
When others proposed rewriting Flash properly, that wasn't enough for you.
You wanted it Flash GONE. Unsupported. Erased.
You probably supported PNG over GIF because you were a Hipster who didn't like animation.
"If I don't like animation, I want nobody to have it!"
Well look at GIF now. Still strong as ever. Who knew.
And when she left because you couldn't satisfy her,
you blamed her unreasonable and insatiable desire.
You said, 'Good riddance'. Now you're all alone.
Without Flash and you'll die childless too.
Since your web browser disabled Flash you don't even masturbate anymore.
You listen to Morrisey a lot. People who no longer support Flash do.
What's the use? Can't even play HOME SHEEP HOME.
Your ex just moved in with a guy who still runs XP.
He supports Flash.
They play HOME SHEEP HOME together.
She like to look at GIFs.
They're expecting.
Just thought you'd like to know.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Shitty, write-once, update-never, but pay-us-for-a-subscription educational software uses Flash and other plug-ins (Java, right? ew).
we still don't have anything that comes close to replacing it.
html has SVG for resolution-independent vector graphics, canvas for bitmapped graphics, video for .. video, webgl for 3d, etc... but making all these things work together seamlessly is next to impossible.
using SVG natively from javascript is a nightmare, CSS and SVG don't mix well, mixing SVG & canvas is ill-advised, multi-device/dynamic-quality audio/video playback is DIY (at best), webgl is completely separate from everything, there's no overarching animation/timeline (no, CSS3 doesn't count) everything is just a mish-mash of separate projects that people thought might fit in the browser - there's no cohesion.
flash wasn't perfect - it certainly had it's fair share of issues. but what it did do well was integrate all of its technologies together reasonably well. that and AS3 had a type system.
Or forces me to use their app to play the d/l'ed mp4s
we still don't have anything that comes close to replacing it.
we still don't have anything that comes close to the experience of shoveling horse shit in modern transportation alternatives
but seriously my brain addled idiot, if nobody is using it anymore than CLEARLY people have found ways to replace it
or maybe reality, truth and reason are just not for you
My hatred for Flash started when marketing figured out how to exploit it for animated ads.
I hated it even more when marketing figured out they could make the Flash animated ads hover over the content I was trying to read.
Then we got bombarded with them as more and more websites adopted Flash to deliver ads.
The web browsing experience became so awful that I removed the Flash app from my browser.
I really REALLY hated it when a website was Flash only and would nag me to install Flash. When I saw that, I fired off an email to the webmaster telling them I refused to install Flash and demanded a non-Flash entry point, or I was not coming back.
I was hardly alone in my hatred of Flash, and am not shedding tears over Flash being abandoned.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
And yet here I am taking my 2018 DoD IA Cyber Security workforce training and it needs FLASH!
"A 'person' is smart. 'People' are dumb, panicky animals and you know that."
Vsphere web client *still* (As of 6.5) doesn't have all functionalities in HTML 5 version, so at least for us flash is going to stick around for a while longer.
I have no idea who in their right mind decided that replacing the (a bit bloaty, but fast) fat client with the flash approach was a good idea.
Flash is also around in certain other places (e.g. older Cisco server management modules).
So no, flash isn't going away just yet.
One thing that I miss are part of the early memes. Yes, they are not really all that funny, but badger badger, all your base and ultimate showdown all originated with flash. Furthermore, youtube versions of the animations are not exactly perfect substitutes since the vector-based animation can scale up indefinitely...But I guess there will be archival projects.
Flash just-works and has its uses.
Of course it has its uses. That's not a valid excuse to keep such a buggy, proprietary, piece of crap security hole around.
Yes, some websites abused flash, up to the point of making dozens of navigation buttons as flash content, giving it a bad reputation. And of course, it's been haunted by security issues.
"SOME"? Talk about understatement. It was very widely abused and remains so to this day. And its security issues are clearly irreparable which alone should be enough to condemn it to the trash heap of yesterday.
But i also do think it has some valid use cases, not in the last place legacy support.
Fuck legacy support. Not worth it even a little bit.
we still don't have anything that comes close to replacing it.
Thank $diety. Some things should not be replaced. Flash is one of them. There is absolutely nothing Flash did that I miss.
flash wasn't perfect - it certainly had it's fair share of issues.
That's like saying Napoleon's invasion of Russia didn't go perfectly. It was a terrible, awful product that has caused FAR more problems than it ever solved.
we're talking about all Internet sites, not just a small portion of Top 10,000 or Top 1 Million sites
No. Wrong. W3Techs doesn't work that way. From W3Tech's technology overview: "We include only the top 10 million websites (top 1 million before June 2013) in the statistics in order to limit the impact of domain spammers. We use website popularity rankings provided by Alexa (an Amazon.com company) using a 3 months average ranking. Alexa rankings are sometimes considered inaccurate for measuring website traffic, but we find that they serve our purpose of providing a representative sample of established sites very well."
See W3Tech's FAQ and overview.
There are lot's of flash and Shockwave games out there? adobe any planes for an offline player so they can be saved?
Let that be a lesson to technology subversive to the open nature of the internet.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Actually scratch.mit.edu uses flash still.
In all seriousness, your line of questioning is roughly akin to "What kind of wood sealer should I use on the deck chairs of this sinking ship?"
Better analogy: "This ship has been recalled. I want something to move people and cargo across water, but I cannot trust a ship to do so safely if it has been recalled. With what craft should I instead move a similar load without using several times more fuel?"
HTML is an open format, but you can't display websites from the 1990s anymore can you?
The website promoting the Warner Bros. film Space Jam is still viewable in Chrome 64. Many others are on Wayback Machine even if their hosts have dropped off the Internet.
Actually scratch.mit.edu uses flash still.
Try Scratch 3 Preview.
Not complete, but the core is there and works really well.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Google replaced old flash based finance.google.com website with new html5 based one. The new site is a disaster compared to earlier one.
Best news I read today. Now if we can just get Windows 10 to remove it :)
Steve Jobs was right.
ABC mouse uses flash. Its advertises a lot. The programing behind it isn't that great (its awful buggy and kludgy) even if the content is vaster than any free and open source preschool suite I have seen. We need to get more women in free software, and by women, i don't mean just some single girl with nothing to do, I mean mothers and elementary school teachers, and not so they can work on things like (the linux kernel) but actual software that kids use.
4.9% is still way too high
It was what... close to a decade ago now? When Steve Jobs made that post about Flash not being on i devices.
Back then, him and a whole bunch of fanboy tech blogs said that it was the end of Flash, that it was not worth keeping it, etc etc.
Back then I also made a prediction that Flash would be going nowhere anytime soon, and that despite it's flaws, until HTML 5 came around and even then, Flash would still be around just because of how ubiquitous it had become, how some of it's functionalities cannot be fully replaced by anything else that we had available back at the time.
While I agreed that it was a cesspool of vulnerabilities and that Macromedia couldn't make the platform work, due to Flash being used on millions of websites in even small things like ad banners and whatnot, it would take a very very long time for it to go away.
5% is still too much. Sure, most of those websites are probably abandoned by now, and a whole bunch of other cases must be on websites that have clueless or no administration at all, still keeping some old flash banner or something.
But like I predicted, it really took years upon years for the Internet in parts of the world to even be useful without Flash. In the US, trends might get around faster, but in other countries you still had some big services relying on Flash to do some ridiculous stuff to the point you could only use the webpage if you had the plugin installed.
That forceful nature of Apple to assume their "way" has to be uniformly better for everyone is just another bullet point by now on why I never adopted Apple devices in the first place.
Again, while I agreed that Flash had to go at some point, I really didn't like how it being bad was used to justify why Flash pages didn't work on i devices.
But perhaps it was just better that way. Apple got pretty well estabilished as a company that makes products for people to use the way the company wants them to, not the way the users do. And it has worked very well for them.