Flash Ends in 2020 and the Parts of Your Site Still Using It

What Adobe announced

Adobe said yesterday that it will stop updating and distributing Flash Player at the end of 2020, and urged anyone with Flash content to move it to open web formats.

The major browser makers set out their own plans the same day: more requests for permission first, then Flash switched off by default, then removed altogether.

For many visitors the end has already come. No iPhone or iPad has ever run Flash, Android phones dropped it years ago, and Chrome on a computer already asks before playing it on most sites.

So 2020 is not when Flash content stops working. It is when the last visitors who can still see it lose it too.

Where it is still hiding

Sites built in the decade before phones took over used Flash for anything that moved or made a sound, and much of it still plays on the office computer.

• Intro animations that run before the home page, with a skip link.
• Music and audio players on studio, band, venue and event pages.
• Photo galleries with fading transitions and a strip of thumbnails.
• Video players and the clips inside them.
• Animated headers and banners with moving text.
• Menus built as a single animated strip.

The fourth hides a second job. The clips an old player showed are often in Flash's own video format, ending in .flv, and need converting before anything else can play them.

What visitors see today

On a phone: a grey box, a broken-plugin icon, or a gap where something used to be. A menu built in Flash leaves a phone visitor with no menu at all.

In Chrome on a computer: a prompt asking whether to run Flash for this site. Few people weighing up a business they have never used will click it.

Neither produces an error message for the owner, and visitors who meet an empty box rarely write in to mention it.

Why it survived this long

Flash content is usually checked from the office, on a computer where Flash Player was installed years ago and dutifully updated since. There, the gallery plays and the intro runs.

The people who see the empty box are customers on their phones. The owner rarely visits the site that way, so the problem stays invisible to the one person who could fix it.

Flash also tends to sit in parts of the site nobody has edited for years, because changing anything inside a Flash file needs the original working files and software few people still have.

Finding it on your site

Go through every page on a phone and in a current version of Chrome, including the old pages nobody visits. Note each empty box, puzzle-piece icon and request to allow Flash.

Then have whoever looks after the site check the server for files with the .swf extension, which every Flash file carries, and for pages that embed them. That catches what a quick look misses.

Check the corners too: a gallery linked from a single page, a landing page from an old campaign, an audio plugin installed years ago and forgotten.

Rescue the content first

The words, photographs and recordings inside a Flash file often exist nowhere else. Ask the designer who built it whether the original working files survive.

If they do not, go through the content while a computer can still play it: copy out the text, note every caption and figure, and capture each screen.

Audio and video are often easier, because many players loaded them from separate files on the server rather than holding them inside.

A worked example

A recording studio in a converted warehouse built its site in 2009 around a Flash music player on the home page playing tracks recorded in its rooms, and a Flash gallery of the live room.

Bands choosing a studio listen before they call, often on a phone between rehearsals. For years, those visitors had found an empty box where the music should have been.

The studio learned of it when a band mentioned that the site seemed to have no samples. On the office computer, the player had always worked.

The tracks were still on the server, in a folder the player read from. They became ordinary MP3 files in the browser's own audio player, each labelled with the band, the song and the room.

The gallery became plain photographs that resize for a phone, and the equipment list, which had been an image inside the Flash file, was typed out as text. The spinning-reel intro was deleted and not replaced.

What replaces each piece

Current browsers play video and audio themselves, without a plugin: MP4 for video, MP3 for audio. Menus become ordinary links, styled however the design needs.

Galleries become standard galleries that respond to a thumb. Simple movement, where it still earns its place, can be done with the browser's own styling tools.

Page-turning brochures become plain web pages, with a PDF alongside only if customers really do print them.

Converters that turn Flash files into web pages automatically do exist. What they produce is usually heavy and awkward on a phone, so rebuilding from the content is the better route.

The security side

Flash Player has needed security fixes on a steady schedule for years, and its weaknesses have been used to reach office computers through ordinary-looking pages.

Adobe will keep issuing those fixes until the end of 2020, so any computer that still has Flash should keep updating it. Once nothing your business uses needs it, switch it off.

The counter-case

Not everything needs replacing. An intro, an animated banner or a decorative header can simply be deleted, and nobody will miss it.

A site built entirely in Flash sits at the other end. There is nothing to patch, and the sensible course is to rebuild the whole thing rather than repair it piece by piece.

Nor is there reason to panic: what is broken today has mostly been broken for years, and the end of 2020 leaves time to plan.

But anything visitors rely on, such as a menu, a gallery or a player, should be rebuilt this year, while its content can still be opened and copied.

This month

1. Open every page on a phone and in Chrome.
2. List each empty box or Flash prompt.
3. Ask for a search for .swf files.
4. Copy out the content inside each Flash file.
5. Delete intros and decorative banners outright.
6. Rebuild menus, galleries and players as ordinary pages.
7. Switch off Flash Player where nothing needs it.

Step four is the one with a real clock on it. Everything else can be rebuilt at a sensible pace, but the content inside a Flash file gets harder to reach with every browser that stops playing it.

Keeping the rest of the site's software current is covered in automatic plugin updates, yes or no.

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West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.