Using Adobe Flash on your website, particularly for any “mission critical” content is very problematic. We are living in the era of the mobile web so every website owner needs to consider how their site will be viewed on a diverse range of hardware.
- The Flash plugin has never been supported on iOS devices (e.g. iPhones and iPads), leaving users with broken web pages or missing content.
- Adobe no longer supports Flash for Android. Android phone users can no longer install the Flash player from the Google Play store.
- Windows Phone, Blackberry and Symbian do not support Flash.
Even if you can live with these device limitations, consider the following.
- Flash’s programming language (ActionScript) is a complex specialized language, different to more mainstream programming and markup languages and (PHP / HTML). Therefore finding development support for Flash based websites can be expensive if there is advanced functionality involved.
- Many search engines have problems indexing the content of Flash files so your site may receive poor website rankings.
- People with disabilities may not be able to access your site using screen reader devices.
- It may be difficult or impossible to allow users to “deep link” or bookmark specific pages on your site, if the website is completely Flash based.
