Adobe Flash, formerly known as Macromedia Flash, is a multimedia authoring platform used to add video, animation, and interactivity to many diverse areas. Its use in advertising is increasingly common and has given rise to an endless number of online games. You can improve the user experience of audio, text layout and flow, colors, 3D effects, animation, and more. Given all of its capabilities, businesses (especially creative ones) are turning to Flash for more eye-catching websites. Advertising agencies and designers have found a platform that can really bring their message to life and showcase their creativity. They now have the tools to create a site that allows users to interact and be dazzled by your work, instead of just reading what your company is about in plain text.
Should you use Flash on your website? Of course, if you think you can bring additional value to your end users. But unless you are developing some music or a highly animated website, then it is not a perfect option to build a Flash-only website. I’d rather recommend using it for something more like a feature on a website’s home page, to improve the experience, but at the same time make sure it doesn’t have some kind of user experience fallback, especially if it contains some important information.
advantages:
Flash offers an improved experience in terms of animations, transitions, music and video handling. It’s been there since day one to supplement HTML where that just isn’t enough to provide a fuller multimedia experience. It is vector-based, but allows for the addition of bitmaps where needed, such as when screenshots are required as part of a software tutorial. Flash supports audio, animation, and advanced 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 also depends on the chosen flash animation software.
Web designers can also nicely 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 at low cost.
Flash is everywhere. Everyone knows it and rarely does someone who doesn’t have it have trouble installing it. Sure there’s nothing to install for HTML5 (when available), but it will require people to upgrade or use specific browsers to view videos on certain pages. Much more work than simply downloading and installing Adobe Flash Player. Flash Player is distributed on more than 99% of Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets, as well as a wide range of devices.
When it comes to website videos, Flash Video Player is much more than just a video player. It’s a tool that, when used correctly, can give you tremendous amounts of flexibility and power. With features like 3D effects, advanced text support, hardware acceleration, and dynamic streaming… Flash is way ahead of the game.
Being runtime controlled, it can bring the exact same content across platforms and web browsers, without any additional code. It is probably the most widespread web browser plugin in the world.
Flash has also become the de facto way of displaying video on websites (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) due to its compression and packaging capabilities, and is a great way to fix common video codec issues, displaying something completely full screen and other features. HTML 5 is far from complete. The HTML 5 video tag will need a lot of work and support before it can compete with Flash. Also, there’s the issue of browser compatibility and video file formats that it’s not doing anything 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. When it comes to performance, while Flash developers can control it, they rarely seem to get it right. This is also reflected in the duration of the battery life in laptops, shortening it by 10-20%. When they talk to Adobe representatives about this, they claim that there is no performance issue in Flash and that it is all the work of the developers.
One factor that concerns website developers who focus on SEO is the lost placement in search engine rankings for content within Flash animation. The proper way to use a Flash movie in a web page is to have an alternate HTML fallback in the HTML code, both for 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’s not built with the right code and in a good semantic way, it’s impossible to index it correctly. , give the correct weight to certain terms, etc.
Another problem with Flash is that it is included in the web browser as a complete standalone runtime, which means that it would work just as well in a standalone Flash player. The effect of this is that if you focus the Flash movie, all web browser keyboard shortcuts and focus are lost, and you must click outside of the Flash area to refocus.
But it’s not just about the development factors, it’s also about the marketing and end-user experience, where it could be improved with a good use of Flash.
It is also important to note that different websites have 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 support site, having a fancy Flash animation of the company logo at the expense of a knowledge base is not good policy.
Flash also owns. While ownership isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the Internet is built on the principles of open standards and mutual ownership. The rise of proprietary applications like Acrobat and Flash ultimately threatens the effectiveness of the World Wide Web Consortium and similar bodies, and could possibly lead to something like the “browser wars” of the 1990s. to point out that the Flash.SWF format is now in the public domain and third-party products can now be used to create Flash files. There is a wide choice for new developers choosing the right flash animation software.
Conclution
In general, it can be said that Flash is more of an advantage for advertising and websites than a disadvantage.
