Saw this yesterday and had to double check the date because it felt like news from about three years too late: Amazon's ad platform announced it's done taking Flash ads. Starting September 1st, if you want to run a banner through Amazon Media Group, it has to be built in HTML5. No more .swf files, no more Flash Professional exports, none of it. Advertisers and agencies have a week and a half to get their stuff converted or find another network.
I know this reads like the most boring possible tech story, an ad platform changing its file format requirements, but I've had my eye on this one for a while and I think it actually matters more than the headline makes it sound.
Flash has been dying in slow motion for years now. YouTube quietly switched its default player to HTML5 back in January. Firefox straight up blocked Flash for a few days back in July after that Hacking Team breach turned up a pile of zero-day exploits sitting in the plugin, the kind of thing where security researchers were finding new ones almost daily for like two weeks straight. Mozilla patched things up and turned it back on, but the message was pretty clear: this plugin is a liability and everybody knows it. What's kept Flash alive this long, more than anything else, is advertising. Video ads, rich media banners, the stuff that autoplays sound at you while you're trying to read an article at 11pm and scrambling to find the tab making noise. Ad tech is a swamp and it moves slow, and Flash has just been sitting there as the path of least resistance for agencies that don't want to rebuild their creative pipeline.
So when Amazon, which is not a small player, says no more Flash starting next month, that's a real crack in the dam. It's not going to kill Flash by itself. There are still a thousand smaller ad networks that'll happily take a .swf file from you if it comes to that. But when a company Amazon's size draws a line, other networks tend to follow eventually, because nobody wants to be the last big platform still serving the security hole everyone's writing articles about.
Personal aside: I still do freelance work on the side, mostly WordPress stuff, and I've got a client, a local dentist's office actually, whose entire "photo gallery" page is a Flash embed from 2009. It doesn't load at all on their receptionist's iPad. I've mentioned rebuilding it in something that isn't Flash probably four separate times over two years and every time the answer is some version of "it still works though." It does not, in fact, still work, not on anything with a Lightning connector, but that's a losing argument I've stopped having. I bring this up because I think that's the actual reason Flash isn't dead yet even with all this pressure. It's not that anybody loves Flash. Its nobody wants to spend the afternoon rebuilding something that technically, if you squint, still renders on a desktop with the plugin installed.
Anyway. The battery drain complaints, the crash-to-desktop complaints, the CPU fan spinning up because some ad on a news site is doing a full animation loop in the corner, all of that has been true for a decade and Adobe never really fixed it so much as everyone else built around it. Chrome's been experimenting with pausing non-central Flash content automatically, and I'd bet money that becomes the default setting before the year's out, not just an option buried in a menu somewhere.
What I actually want isn't some dramatic announcement where Adobe kills the plugin outright. I doubt that happens for years yet, there's too much old enterprise and government software built on Flash and Air that isn't getting rewritten on anyone's timeline. What I want is exactly this kind of thing, one platform at a time quietly closing the door, until one day you notice the "click to enable Flash" prompt hasn't shown up in your browser in months and you can't remember the last site that needed it.
We're not there yet. But September 1st is a decent marker to remember, and I plan on checking back on it.