Thanks for all the Flash

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This post is over 12 years old - it might be slightly outdated and consigned to the history books.

I feel a bit sorry for Flash sometimes. Adobe Flash was once the most innovative features of the internet. Suddenly video became cross-platform and the interactive web took off in a big way. You could play games on the web! How cool was that?

Now of course we have HTML5 and Apple crushing Flash into the ground. Checkout some of the statistics for Flash -

SWFObject, a neat way to embed Flash content into a website, has seen an interesting rate of decline and growth in the past year -



In the top 10,000 sites on the net, there has been a decline in the users of swfobject.js, whilst in the top million sites, the growth continued until the middle of January 2011 and is now slipping southwards, albeit at a very slow rate.

The next chart, shows sites where we found embedded HTML code for Shockwave flash. It seems people have learnt very quickly that not everyone supports Flash. If we still detect this on a website, there's a good chance on an iPad or iPhone you'd see a blank box, hence the continual drop off of this technology -



On the flip-side, the HTML5 DocType has been implemented on 100 of the top 10,000 websites in just over a month -


Based on the swfobject.js usage trends, Flash still has a long way to go before it is eradicated from the web and maybe, just maybe, Adobe can turn Flash around and make it popular again, who knows?!
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