It may have taken much longer than expected, but Adobe’s Flash is finally seeing its demise. After a tweet from the chief security officer at Facebook called on Adobe to set a kill date for Flash, Mozilla, the company behind the popular web browser Firefox, announced they would block Flash by default on all versions of their browser. Although this may seem like a bad thing for those that plan their meetings around what time they need to harvest their corn in FarmVille, it is a true turning point for the future of the web.

No, not my precious cows! Will I be forced to put them out to pasture?

For the average user, this isn’t that big of an issue. Firefox only takes up around 17% of the market share for browser usage. With Google’s Chrome above 50% and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer at a higher-than-most-developers-want share of about 20% (although luckily most of them are in the newest version), many won’t notice any change in their daily surfing. If all browsers follow suit, which eventually they will, there may be some problems.

Although we aren’t still in the late 1990s and early 2000s, where Flash websites were all the rage with flying buttons and music playing when you didn’t want them to, many websites today still have dependencies on Flash files. With today’s sites, Flash delivers rich web content. These can consist of animated banners and ads, intro videos or movie pop-ups, or even fancy forms that have multiple stages and validation.

These sound awesome; why must we do away with Flash?

Two big concerns with Flash files involve mobile users and search engines. By including Flash files in your website, not only will iPhone, iPad, and most Android users not be able to view those files, but search engines will not be able to sift through for content. If a lot of your content is within those files, Google won’t have much idea as to what your business specialties include. Besides those concerns, the main issue with Flash is the vulnerabilities with which it is associated. A majority of web users have experienced YouTube’s error where the Flash Player has needed a new update. In most cases, this is due to a new exploit or bug found in the code that needs fixing. It might be upsetting that you can’t watch your favorite cat video that day, but you are probably not as annoyed as the company that lost precious data thanks to hackers installing malicious software through these vulnerabilities.

While those features may seem like decent reasons to keep Flash available to the masses, all of these can be handled in much better ways using new web technologies. Thankfully, many websites today have taken the steps toward a Flash-less experience, updating video players with new HTML features, or using banners with more up-to-date scripting. YouTube’s Flash player has been replaced and libraries are being updated to allow banners with swift animations. Most importantly for our agency partners, all of the Zywave website themes are free from the shackles of Flash files, giving all of your clients a safe, secure, and consistent user experience. The end of Flash will be a blessing when it finally arrives, but if you still need your FarmVille fix, just download the app.