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.

Comments

Is this just because they can't give up

[rsilvergun]

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).

Re:Is this just because they can't give up

[tepples]

Newgrounds, Kongregate, Albino Blacksheep, Dagobah, Animutation Portal, and the like still use Flash to present vector animations and games whose authors either can't be located or lack the time=money to remake them from scratch using HTML5.

A WebM or MPEG-4 video is not a close substitute for a vector animation because a video's file size is roughly an order of magnitude larger, eating into the viewer's cap. (Though most devices with a built-in cellular radio can't play Flash in the first place, home wireless ISPs impose a monthly Internet data transfer quota even on desktop devices.) It's an even worse substitute for a game, unless it's a narrative-driven game that can be fully experienced in a playthrough video.

It is hard to kill a technology.

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:It is hard to kill a technology.

[zieroh]

Say I want to make an animutation that plays back using a vector animation technology other than Flash Player. Which software would you recommend for this?

I would recommend using your time to do something else.

How would someone who has submitted a work to such a portal convert a Flash animation to an HTML5 vector animation,* or a Flash game to an HTML5 game?

That's easy: don't. It's a stupid waste of time, and ultimately not very important in the grand scheme of things.

Never let it be said that I can't answer a rhetorical question.

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?" You think you're being insightful, but you're really just protesting the inevitable death of flash with petty, meaningless points. Move on. Get over it. Do something useful.

Re:It is hard to kill a technology.

[mark-t]

Or perhaps the poster wasn't asking what they could do to keep flash alive, they were asking what they needed to do to adapt their workflow to newer technologies to achieve specific ends. Your comments read as if those ends (animated vector diagrams) are neither possible nor desired with modern technologies.

Of course, I'm sure that it's a whole lot easier to effectively insult a person by suggesting that their question is irrelevant than it is to try and actually answer it.

How many of them are hentai porn?

[Kenja]

Because that's the only place.... my friend.... sees flash these days.

Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Too bad

[DontBeAMoran]

Flash also has big performance issues. It only ever worked well on Windows systems.

As for HTML5 having performance issues, I've played 3D games that run fine on my now-8-years-old Mac mini (Core 2 Duo, nVidia 320m) so you must have a really weak computer.

Re:Too bad

[Oswald McWeany]

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'.

Sure, it makes somethings easier, but what % of security compromises on home computers were from non-up-to-date flash exploitations on people's machines? I don't remember the %, but I remember it was shockingly high.

Re:what's insane is still more dev

[Oswald McWeany]

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.

Comcast has a reputation to uphold. They can't just start doing things which are secure or customer friendly; people will start to think they're a reputable company.

Rental only

[tepples]

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.