[hunt]

I find it strange Flash is still around, given that iOS and Android don't support Flash anymore and that YouTube has made a lot of video content available as HTML5. I thought that other sites would have followed suit. Is there evidence of a mass exodus from Flash?

[tim333]

A gentle decline rather than an exodus. Roughly 12% of websites use it today down from 16% a year ago.

http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cp-flash/all/all

[hunt]

Thanks for the link, that's more steady than I had expected.

It's a shame that website doesn't have graphs from the time that Android and iOS announced they wouldn't support flash - it would be interesting to see if there was a noticeable bump.

[jinushaun]

There is way more to Flash than video. You see a lot of Flash silently running invisible in the background to enable modern web app features that aren't yet possible or easily achieved with standard HTML and JS. For example, Flash was used for web sockets before web sockets was a thing. Flash was also used to facilitate uploads.

[chriswarbo]

This is definitely true, given how often I've had my keyboard become unresponsive, only to find out that some little Flash widget had the focus and completely bypassed the browser, requiring me to use the pointer to click on some (hopefully) empty area of the page.

I will say that Flash isn't usually required for most of these uses; just like Javascript it should degrade gracefully to a fallback (eg. a POST form for uploads). Except for web sockets, if they're powering something fundamental (which is the same for JS).

The only time I've added a Flash widget to a page without a fallback has been "copy to clipboard" buttons, which didn't have a decent alternative. In those cases the button just doesn't show at all.

[Chordless]

There's also way more to Flash than websites. Using Adobe AIR, developers can take their content created in Flash, and package it into apps for iOS, Android, and also for Windows and Mac.