During his lifetime, Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and former CEO, was known to be one of the most opinionated figures in the tech world. And while he certainly wasn’t right about everything, there’s one thing he got right years before many others: his famous rejection of Flash.
Five years after Jobs published an open letter defending his company’s decision to leave Flash off its mobile devices and slamming Flash as unreliable and unsafe, the majority of the internet industry has come to the same conclusion.
Flash is now widely regarded as a performance-hampering safety hazard and more and more companies are turning their back on what was once the industry standard: Citing security concerns, Mozilla recently disabled the Flash plugin in its Firefox browser by default; Amazon has banned it from its advertising network and other companies are following suite. In August 2015, just 22 percent of websites in the Alexa Top 10,000 used Flash, down from almost 50 percent four years earlier.
The last stronghold of Flash is banner advertising, which still relies on Flash to a large extent. Once more advertising networks and web browsers start blocking Flash though, advertisers won’t have a choice but to turn to other technologies as well.