Recently one of my reader commented on my Post Web Standards and described how some Company in his 
knowledge suffered due to fully Flash Website.
Flash is a great interactive tool and really has changed Web Contents but in my view, it is not a good choice for most commercial web sites. Its great to use Flash as part of website, but in no way a prudent choice for full website. Flash being a proprietary technology breaks most web standards and conventions.
Here are six reasons, why we should avoid to use Flash.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Problems:
Although recently Google has announced that with collaboration of Adobe, now they are able to read through Flash contents but still Information embedded in Flash is often invisible to many other large search engines like MSN.
Search engines scan information on a web site, process and retrieving the best match for each user query. Robots (Small Software, used by Search Engines to scan a website) usually cannot process text embedded in Flash and graphic files. Sites designed completely in Flash often offer very little textual information completely ignoring different type of SEO Basics and fully contravene with most of rules given in Google Web Master Guide.
Tip: From SEO point of view, don’t use fancy flash buttons and navigation bars. Search engines track and love text links.
2. Statistics; An Important feature of Today’s Web; is missing
Web Statistics helps to evaluate website success and provide important information about visitor’s behavior, that help professional Web Developers, Designers and Marketer to come with more better and user oriented web solutions.
Some of important questions, web statistics answers are: Visitors came from, the pages visited and from where visitors left a site. Web Statistics are able to track when a Flash object, typically a swf file, is viewed. They are not able to track navigation within a Flash object – so if a site is composed of one Flash object which contains multiple site sections, the web analytic system will see a swf download, but will have no idea which parts of the site a visitor viewed nor where the visitor left the site.
3. Flash breaks web usability standards
Flash Breaks some of most important Web Usability Standards. Few examples are:
- Browser Back Button do not work.
- You cannot copy-paste important information like contact information.
- Important Accessibility Features of browsers like Zoom In, Zoom our and Font Size change are not available.
- You can’t book mark some page form site for future review. (As Flash Site has only one page as per Browser Eye)
4. Lack of consistent cross platform support
One of the keystones of the web is that a website should work in any browser on any computer – it is openness and standardization which has made the Internet universal. Flash breaks the basic tenets of website design. While most Internet users have Flash installed – they don’t necessarily have the right version installed. Indeed version 8 wasn’t even released for the Linux platform, locking those users out of sites developed for Flash 8 and 9 (Flash 9 for Linux has finally been released, months after the Windows version).
5. Some users disable Flash to avoid flash based advertising.
Savvier web users have learned to disable Flash in web pages to avoid animated advertising and / or to improve page-loading times on dial-up connections.
6. Website updates continually require Flash skills
Although now Flash based photo galleries and some other content management features are available but either that higly expensive or have limited features. Usually for sites developed in flash need high level flash skills for updation.
Hi Khuram, You created this blog post based off of my comments from an earlier post. How cool and responsive. After reading it I learned many valuable points but the most interesting is that Google can now read Flash. I will need to look into this more. You also make a great point about not using Flash Buttons. Thanks for the great information!
I am thankful for your nice comments and visiting us again. Here are some information that can further clear your concept about Google and Flash.
Yes Google can read Flash Text now. Although I still not recommend for Full Fledge Flash site, but now Flash Banners can get good attention from Google. Still no Other search Engines have this technology.
What content can Google better index from Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.
In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, Google is also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into crawling pipeline—just like it does with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.
Adobe donated Flash Player to Mozilla making it open source.
Also if you build your flash application correctly you can make it use the back button and bookmark-able. Its advanced but you can do it.
Soon Google will be able to index Flash Player content.
You CAN copy and paste, in-fact you can choose to or not to let your visitors select text to copy it, you can always paste in a text area.
I am not expert in Flash, But based on feed back from my developer team and and clients, i still donot find it prudent choice for Commercial sites, even we take your points as it is.
1. Sites are heavy and take time to load.
2. Its complex to build such sites which really take care of all accessibility standards.
Google is able to Index Flash Files, as they described in their Web Master Blog. But still they have lot of limitations.
No matter how good Google is with flash, at this stage I would not rely on Google’s ability to interpret Flash for SEO. I would never design a commercial web site (that is heavily depends on search engines) with 100% flash. I use the RunFlashActive.js to avoid most of the Flash blocking, however, it’s not 100% guarantee that all users will be able to see flash-based content. For the commerce web sites, I use Flash only for promotional banners (with added keyword-text below). However, I use Flash for navigation/headers for a regular, informational web site.
1. And there’s an awful problem with 56k connections
2. The problems with porting to others platforms such as FreeBSD and so on (There’s many others plants that rise on earth, beside of Windows && GNU/Linux)
3. On the same times : lack of development kit/toolkit on others platforms
* We need some sort of same || semi standard based on W3C to accomplish with these issues.
See What’s new at Google about Flash Indexing:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html
Well it’s really clear for my part that you’re no expert in Flash because all the elements you are describing now has been long fix by using some well know techniques. It’s true that Flash by itself is not really friendly to search engines and screen readers. And it’s also true that it takes more time and more effort to develop good flash sites with accessibility and search engine optimization. But it’s all false that we can’t achieve what you’re describing with flash.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Problems:
Well for that point Flash in itself is not search engine friendly but with good embedding technique you can provided alternative content (the exact same content that is in the flash page or site) so search engine won’t be penalized. Especially if you used database driven site then you can generate the alternative content base on the requested page by the user and the search engine will treat that exactly like any other HTML page.
2. Statistics; An Important feature of Today’s Web; is missing
This point is clearly showing your lack of knowledge in this matter. We track every Flash we realize here at our web shop and we track everything, page, video download start, conversion, and goal, file type requested, roll over on some hotspot, navigation etc… Just do some research with Google Analytics and you will see for yourself. We can even track things like viral elements.
3. Flash breaks web usability standards
In each and every site we do now the browser back and forth button are working perfectly and the user can also bookmark all the pages of the flash site. The address changes when changing page content of the flash site. For the copy and paste thing, it’s only a matter of enabling it for text in the flash site. Usually it’s something developer forgot when developing flash site.
4. Lack of consistent cross platform support
No more true. Since Flash 8 Linux, OS X, And Windows has available flash player plug-in download. The penetration rate is also extremely high. It’s true that it’s not 100% has a basic HTML site will do, but if you built the site well and applied the technique describe in point 1, every other non flash enable user will see the alternate version.
5. Some users disable Flash to avoid flash based advertising.
Yes, i agree, but again with the technique describe in 1, the user will be able to see the content usually delivered in Flash.
6. Website updates continually require Flash skills
For this point, it really depends on how you’ve built the Flash site because with Content Management System and database driven Flash web Sites, changes can be done directly in the CMS or in the database or in an XML file at least so there’s no need to recompile the Flash file every time. Apart from animation that will always require Flash skills even if the flash animation is integrated in an HTML site as a module.
I just wanted to make things clear for people who view this article and have less knowledge in Flash oriented development. The things you state in here were true 4 years ago but know where at another level for flash development (well for people who know what they are doing).
Dear Phurlong
Under Every point, you described, you admitted that these issue are there but can be ignored to some extent using techniques.
I don’t want to stop Web Developers using Flash, but just want them to take care of these points. And I highly appreciate your response and comments.
I can’t agree more with you on that, it’s just the way the article was written, it seems to assume that these point where not possible to realise with Flash Development, i just wanted to give a point of the other way around.
Here is another reason.. it doesn’t work in Firefox under 64-bit Vista or Windows 2008 (and probably not Windows 7 either)
May be you are right Phurlog.
I will revise the article after making due re-search on points you have mentioned.
I highly appreciate your concern, and i hope you will read other articles also and give your valuable comments.
phurlong, thanks for this important comment. The article on its own is too much irritating.
Interesting to me is that this is one of those articles that tries to write against a phenomenon that can’t be stopped. And even better, it tries to list technical arguments against it. If you have a look at what the customers demand is you can’t win with all your standardized markup in the future. There are already requirements that can’t be done in HTML, AJAX, etc. So, we build mixed implementations where parts are already in Flash today. The next step is thinking about to get a better desktop behavior. So, a full-blown Flash application is the next logical step.
The adoption of Flex shows that this will change the frontend development dramatically in the next years. Discussions about the support of a back button become absurd, because the browser becomes a desktop that shows a single application window. All navigation is done by the application itself and not the browser. S
Flash player is not available on iPhone. I don’t remember the status of other mobile platforms, but I would consider this a huge drawback.
@rainwebs
I am surprised with the anger you are showing. Every one can have different viewpoint and experience.
We are here to help each other. If I have some wrong experience with some application, it doesn’t mean every one to agree with.
You can see many comments against and some have even more reasons to not use Flash like @gino.
I am not against using Flash, neither i am of opinion that problems in a technology cannot be overcome. Please be positive and help the friends like @gino to get their problems solved about Flash.
Flash is a good technology, but I have never seen anything as misused as flash. This is especially true with commercial websites who have the budget to pay somebody to make the website.
I have flash on my website, but it doesn’t include the products I’m selling. I have it on there as a “wow” factor when you “come through the front door.” I’m finding a few SEO issues with it, but overall I’ve been happy and have no plans to take it down.
At a seminar that I gave last winter, I told a group of marketing people that if they were considering Flash Intros that they should seriously reconsider this choice. About half of the group had “uh oh” looks on their faces and put their heads down. They had all planned Flash Intros and had no idea why these intros are a huge mistake.
Flash intros are the bane of users. Users hate waiting for them to load and about 90% of users skip them anyway. Whenever I see a Flash Intro, I bail out of the site because I don’t want to wait for the site to load. This means you are losing site traffic right away and users aren’t ever getting an opportunity to view your products or services pages. We always tell our clients not to use them because, besides being usability nightmares, they usually cost quite a bit and don’t add any value to your site.
Perhaps the only audience who actually watches these things are marketing people. That’s because these pieces are vanity spots touting a company’s value. Your users aren’t marketing people and your Flash Intro is not going to convince them to buy your products or services. Plus, users have seen so many of these in the ’90s that they are no longer cool.
Do your bottom line and your users a huge favor and don’t add a Flash Intro to your site. Your traffic will improve dramatically and so should your sales and leads.