Seven years ago, Steve Jobs launched the once-popular Abode Flash into a long, slow death spiral when he announced that Flash would not be installed on any of his cutting-edge products, particularly the iPad and iPhone. Jobs argued that Flash was slow, cumbersome, battery intensive, incompatible with touch-screens, and had massive security issues.
Since then, Flash has fallen out of favor for a number of very good reasons. First, it remains a serious security concern. Second, around five years ago, Adobe announced that Flash would not be available for mobile devices, which is where Internet users were headed. And third, HTML5 emerged in 2014 as an adequate replacement for Flash as a development platform for multimedia applications such as animation and games.
Five years ago, Flash was active on close to 30 percent of all websites. Today, that number is down to less than 8 percent, according to W3Techs, a division of Q-Success Management Consulting.
However, Flash is still being used on some of the major sites on the Internet, including the New York Times, salesforce.com, Fox News, Spotify and Starbucks. And while Adobe has recognized that Flash’s best days are behind it, the company is continuing to patch and update the software. And end users continue to download the Flash player plug-in, even though most security pros consider it a serious risk.
