As I wrote in a previous article, using Flash for your photography website is a very bad idea with some very negative consequences. Now Adobe is announcing end of life for Flash.
This comes as excellent news for the modern web developer and it won't be long before browsers will totally cease support for it, effectively breaking any websites that are still using the outdated technology. If it wasn't enough before to make sure you port your website over to a modern and more standards-compliant format, this is another wake up call and warning to act.
There are still a lot of photography websites that still use Flash. It once was a very "hip" way to display images, with animations, and helped to prevent people right-click stealing your work. But now, with HTML/JavaScript we can get nice animations in a very compliant form that also gives us the ability to use CSS and adaptive technologies for a full responsive and mobile-friendly website.
Flash has never been successful on mobile with Apple never supporting it (for good reason). The UI that folks would develop in Flash often relied heavily on mouse events, such as rollover, which doesn't work on touchscreen devices. Photography website designers should pay special attention to this, as a great many of our customers (namely high school seniors) don't even use a computer, and everything is done on mobile devices. Many modern web developers actually now develop with a "mobile-first" priority now, instead of the other way around.
There's still time — act now and make sure your website is modern and Flash-less. You can read Adobe's press release announcing their plans here.
[via Gizmodo]
Is the Adobe Portfolio hosting completely dependent on Flash?
Been hearing this for over 10 years. I believe it, now lets see it!
Now if Fstoppers can post videos that do not need flash. I can use Google chrome to watch flash videos but it is a pain.
I can't recall a time in the past few years where we've had Flash video on the site. 99% of the time we use YouTube or Vimeo embeds. I haven't had Flash installed for many years and have been able to view everything we publish. Can you give a specific example?
I haven't seen it on the site either, I do however see it on a lot of photographers' websites still, shockingly.
...and not a day too soon