Well, it seems like Google is getting another nail in the coffin for Flash. The former has announced that it will stop accepting ads made with Adobe’s much-maligned add-on in June this year and ban them entirely from January 2nd, 2017.
Both parts of Google’s advertising business, Google Display Network and DoubleClick, will stop showing Flash, meaning that all ads will have to use HTML5 for animations.
Google said: “To enhance the browsing experience for more people on more devices, the Google Display Network and DoubleClick Digital Marketing are now going 100% HTML5.”
As for the video ads, they will still be using Flash for the time being, however, we are sure that the clock is ticking for them as well.
According to the data from Ad Age, over 100m Flash-based adverts were displayed to users globally from January to June 2015, while 84% of banner ads were still Flash. It is expected that these numbers will go down significantly over the next few years, as other advertising services are also following suit. The most recent being Amazon, which has blocked Flash ads from its own website.
The war on Flash is also aimed at the Chrome Browser. According to a data from Statcounter, Chrome is currently in use by 57.8% of the desktop internet market and 47.8% of the global internet-using public across mobile, desktop, tablet and consoles.
With the video services, like YouTube shutting down support for Flash for HTML5 or digital rights management-laden Microsoft Silverlight, it looks like Flash will be used for embedded tools for software-as-a-services, such as administration packages. So for those who are not using SAP or Oracle, it seems like the world is soon going to be free of Flash.
We had reported a while ago how Flash has lead to a series of malware issues amongst other things.
