If you’re like me you hate websites that still support Flash. Adobe Flash causes more problems than any other type of code and over the years has had security bugs too numerous to count.
As an added insult, if you’re interested in browsing the web privately, it’s not good clearing your cookies and thinking the job is done – Flash cookies are stored separately and hidden away meaning advertisers can still track you across the web.
Now Amazon have at last decided to ban all Flash adverts from their site. They’ve announced that “Beginning September 1, 2015, Amazon no longer accepts Flash ads on Amazon.com, AAP, and various IAB standard placements across owned and operated domains”.
Amazon went on to explain that “This is driven by recent browser setting updates from Google Chrome, and existing browser settings from Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari, that limits Flash content displayed on web pages”.
The reason for Amazon banning Flash? They simply said “This change ensures customers continue to have a positive, consistent experience across Amazon and its affiliates, and that ads displayed across the site function properly for optimal performance”. To translate Flash is pretty horrible, it annoys our customers and quite frankly doesn’t work very well for our advertisers either.
Now if only eBay would follow suit and do the same…
One Response
This is a nightmare of a problem, it isn’t one that will fade away smoothly. Adobe Flash is everywhere, like Acrobat it has been a cornerstone for computers since near the beginning.
When Mozilla changed it’s options for Flash recently I accepted the advice making it’s use a manual and not an automatic acceptance. Weeks later I’m fairly pissed off that a lot of my “internet experience” now seems to be a broken one as I’m sick of getting “grey boxes” and pop up choices on what I should do in huge numbers.
One or two big boys making this decision isn’t going to make things all right overnight. Nor will much of the smaller web-sites spend the time to replace Flash either.
So . . . what is Adobe doing about this “change of wind”? Surely they’re not just walking away? News from them seems rather quiet.