Adobe Flash, formerly known as Macromedia Flash, is a multimedia authoring platform used to add video, animation, and interactivity to many different areas. Its use in advertising is increasingly common and has promoted countless online games. You can enhance the user experience of audio, text layout and flow, colors, 3D effects, animation, and more. Given all its capabilities, businesses (especially creative ones) are turning to Flash for, well, more eye-catching websites. Advertising agencies and designers have found a platform that can really bring your message to life and showcase your creativity. They now have the tools to create a site that allows users to interact and be excited about their work, rather than simply reading what their business is about in plain text.

Should you use Flash on your website? Of course, if you think you can add extra value to your end users. But unless you are developing some music or a very animated website, then creating a Flash-only website is not a perfect option. I’d rather use it for something more like a function on a website’s home page, to improve the experience, but at the same time make sure it doesn’t have some kind of UX endorsement, especially if it contains some important information.

Advantage:

Flash offers an improved experience when it comes to animations, transitions, music, and video handling. It has been there from day one to supplement HTML where that is not enough to provide a more complete multimedia experience. It is vector-based, but allows the incorporation of bitmaps where necessary, such as when screenshots are required as part of a software tutorial. Flash supports advanced audio, animation, and interactivity. One of the biggest benefits is that it is relatively easy to learn, as it provides a designer-friendly authoring environment. However, it requires a good understanding of computer graphics, and advanced features require familiarity with programming or scripting techniques, but it also depends on the chosen flash animation software.

Web designers can also very well integrate Flash animations with other web technologies. It can be extremely bandwidth efficient, compared to other ways of displaying multimedia content. Flash has a large developer community (more than 3.5 million developers use the Flash platform), which provides great support for developers. There are many pre-built Flash files that can be downloaded for free or inexpensively.

Flash is everywhere. Everybody knows it and rarely does someone who doesn’t have it has trouble installing it. Sure there is nothing to install for HTML5 (when it will be available) but it will require people to update browsers or use specific ones to watch videos on certain pages. Much more work than simply downloading and installing Adobe Flash Player. Flash Player spreads on more than 99% of Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets, as well as on a wide range of devices.

When it comes to video on websites, Flash video player is much more than just a video player. It’s a tool that, when handled correctly, can give you a tremendous amount of flexibility and power. With features like 3D effects, advanced text support, hardware acceleration, and dynamic streaming … Flash is way ahead.

Being a controlled runtime, you can fetch the exact same content across web browsers and platforms, without any additional code. It is probably the most widespread web browser plugin in the world.

Flash has also become the de facto way to display videos on websites (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) due to its compression and packaging capabilities, and is a great way to troubleshoot common video codec problems, displaying something completely in full screen and other features. HTML 5 is a long way from completion. The HTML 5 video tag will need a lot of work and support before it can compete with Flash. Also, there is the issue of compatibility with browser and video file formats, which you are doing nothing to fix at the moment.

Disadvantages:

What seems to be the biggest annoyance for people is the slow performance and lots of unwanted animations and such. Performance wise, although Flash developers can control it, they rarely seem to do it right. This is also reflected in the duration of battery life in laptops, shortening it by 10-20%. When talking to Adobe representatives about this, they state that there is no performance issue in Flash and that it is all the doing of the developers.

One factor that worries website developers focusing on SEO is the loss of placement in search engine rankings for content within Flash animation. The correct way to use a Flash movie on a web page is to have an alternate HTML backing in the HTML code, for both SEO and accessibility reasons, and to use JavaScript to dynamically embed your Flash movie. Unfortunately, most developers seem to ignore accessibility, and when it comes to SEO, the answer is usually: “Google is working on indexing Flash movies, so the problem will go away soon.” What they don’t seem to realize, however, is that it doesn’t matter if Google and other search engines manage to index the content, if it is not built with the proper code and good semantics, it is impossible to index it correctly. , give the correct weight to certain terms, etc.

Another problem with Flash is that it is bundled with the web browser as a full standalone runtime, which means it would work the same in a standalone Flash player. The effect of this is that if you focus on the Flash movie, all keyboard shortcuts and web browser focus are lost, and you have to click outside of the Flash area to refocus.

But, it’s not just about development factors, it’s also about end-user experience and marketing, where it could be improved with good use of Flash.

It is also important to note that different websites serve different purposes. Some websites are created entirely to promote a corporate image, or to market or promote products and services. For these sites, Flash is an important tool. But for a customer service site, having a fancy Flash animation of the company logo at the expense of a knowledge base is not a good policy.

Flash is also proprietary. While ownership is not necessarily a bad thing, the Internet is built on the principles of open standards and mutual ownership. The emergence of proprietary applications such as Acrobat and Flash ultimately threatens the effectiveness of the World Wide Web Consortium and similar bodies, and could possibly lead to something akin to the “browser wars” of the 1990s. However, it would be I neglect not to point out that the Flash.SWF format is now in the public domain and that third-party products can now be used to create Flash files. There are a wide variety of options for new developers choosing the right flash animation software.

conclusion

All in all, you can say that Flash is more of an asset to advertising and websites than a disadvantage.