Why shouldn't I use Flash?

Question

I\'ve heard many times that I should avoid flash for my website. Yet no one has told me a good reason for this. I\'ve searched for reasons and I see many that are not true (such

Answer 1

Edit: It might go without saying, but this answer is over a decade old at this point and there is now absolutely no good reason I can think of to use Flash. All of the functionality that Flash has is now natively supported by modern web browsers.

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You cannot open links in a new tab in Flash. You cannot use the browser's "Find" feature in Flash. You cannot zoom in Flash. You cannot use mouse gestures in Flash. You cannot use your browser's spellcheck in Flash. I could go on.

However, you can play video and audio in Flash. You can show complex animations in Flash. You can access the user's webcam and microphone in Flash. And you can do many other things in Flash that you cannot do in HTML--in a cross-browser way.

In other words, Flash is bad for usability, but has many legitimate uses. If you need one of Flash's features and HTML just doesn't cut it, there is no reason not to use Flash. However, you need to be aware of the drawbacks and not use it simply because you want to.

Answer 2

Most modern netbooks and some old computers' performance is still OK from internet browsing and document editing and a lot of people are not going to replace their computers to the powerful ones as they are happy with what they have got. But since Adobe Flash v10+ and windows audiodg.exe process introduction Flash object in the browser caused that these computers stop responding. This causes that websites loses their visitors when the website is rebuilt to be a Flash based application. As an example store.nike.com can be given. Even on Windows XP a single core systems with CPU up to 1.6 GHz are not good to browse this website.

Answer 3

Accessibility.

Screen readers can't read flash files, can't understand what the flash content represents & can't read it. It's important not to discriminate against people you have problems reading/seeing the screen.

Answer 4

Main reasons for me:

1. Flash sites tend to be slower for me (running on a mac) and I've found some sites (hotels in particular), where I was totally unable to access some of the functionality.

2. I've noticed recently that more and more flash items on pages seem to be throwing errors (I have Adobe flex installed at work, and get a prompt to debug it). The latest version seems to be a bit shaky.