Eight Reasons Not to Use Flash
Using Flash on your website may be driving your customers away.
While we concede that Flash isn't going away immediately,
we do believe that there are good reasons to not choose Flash when developing a site.
- About 7% of browsers do not have Flash enabled. That's an estimated 125 million people worldwide who can't see the 1 in 4 websites that use Flash.
- iOS is the dominant mobile browser, making up over half of that market. Since Apple refuses to implement flash, 65% of mobile browsers can't see Flash sites.
- While Google can read SWF files, it was built to crawl HTML, limiting Flash's organic SEO potential.
- Flash files are more difficult to update than traditional HTML, slowing down the frequency of content updates.
- Since Flash uses deprecated tags to function, it often isn't W3C valid.
- Flash is proprietary, paid software. The web is built on and prefers open standards.
- Flash breaks context and navigation menus. Back, forward, and right click don't work in Flash sites.
- With DHTML libraries such as jQuery and mootools, special effects are no longer limited to Flash.
It's important to give up one's tech industry ego and consider their customer's experience as their first priority. The end user doesn't care what you did to make your website work, they only care that it works. Flash limits that experience needlessly.
