In 2015, YouTube replaced Adobe Flash Player with HTML5 as its default web video player. Facebook also announced its plan to switch from Flash to HTML5 for all its web video interfaces. With large online video sharing platforms moving migrating from Flash to HTML5, many analysts considered Flash was on a ventilator. In 2017, Adobe announced its plan to stop supporting and updating Flash Player after 2020. Major web browsers will stop supporting Flash Player in phases.
If your website still delivers video, audio, and animations through Flash, it is time to switch to an open and commonly used standard like HTML5. Unlike Flash, HTML5 will enable end users to access audio and video content without using any specific plug-in or application. At the same time, you can use HTML5 to embed, customize, and manage the video clips without putting extra time and effort. Also, HTML5 will help you to keep the website responsive and make its content accessible on varied devices. There are also a number of reasons why you must consider migrating Flash to HTML5 without any delay.
7 Reasons Why You Much Migrate from Flash to HTML5 without Any Delay
1) Adobe will stop supporting Flash by 2021
Adobe has already announced its decision to stop supporting, updating, and distributing Flash Player by the end of 2020. The tech enterprise even recommends users to migrate their existing Flash content to new open formats like HTML5. Hence, you cannot keep your websites and web applications relevant beyond 2020 without migrating from Flash to HTML5. In addition to running rich audio and video content smoothly, HTML5 will also help you to keep your websites relevant and popular in the long run.
2) Major browsers have already started disabling Flash
Major web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Edge, and Opera has already started disabling Flash in phases. Microsoft will disable Flash in Internet Explorer and Edge by 2020. Likewise, Google will disable Flash in Chrome in phases. However, Mozilla will allow users to run Flash on Firefox through the Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) till end of 2020. Hence, there are always chances that many users will not be able to access the audio and video content of your website if you do not migrate from Flash to HTML5.
3) Enable users to access videos without installing any plug-in or application
Adobe Flash Player is both cross-platform and browser-independent. But the users cannot access audio, video, or animations if Flash Player plug-in is not installed on their computers. Hence, Flash impacts your website’s user experience adversely by requiring end users to download and install a specific plug-in. On the other hand, HTML5 will make your website enable users to access videos and audios seamlessly without installing any specific plug-in or video player application. At the same time, the HTML5 developers can embed audio and video files in a web page through specific tags.
4) Embed audio and video files without writing additional code
Adobe Flash helps developers to make websites and web applications interactive. But the developers have to write additional lines of code to make the audio and video content accessible on varied devices. They even have to write longer lines of code to customize and stylize the videos as Flash does not support text font size scaling and internal page bookmarking. HTML5, at the same time, enables developers to embed videos and audio files in web pages through specific tags. The developers can use the <video> tag to embed video files and the <audio> tag to embed audio files. They even take advantage of the various properties and attributes of these tags to control the multimedia content without writing additional code.
5) Simplify video customization and management
In addition to improving your website’s performance and user experience, HTML5 will further help you customize the video content according to your marketing strategy. The developers can integrate HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript to make your videos more appealing by creating styles. HTML5 further enables programmers to customize the videos through a number of options – animation, gradients, opacity and transition. At the same time, the developers can take advantage of various attributes of the <video> tag to change video images, enable autoplay option, play video clips in loops, play/pause the video, and adjust the sound. At the same time, they can also use HTML5 as a commonly used standard for mobile ads.
6) Improve your website’s performance and user experience
A large percentage of visitors nowadays abandon websites that do not load in three seconds. Flash impacts user experience of your website negatively by loading the web pages slowly. The users also need high speed internet to access the websites using Flash extensively. On the other hand, HTML5 will make your website deliver richer user experience by keeping it both responsive and fast. A number of studies even suggest that HTML5 videos perform optimally on a number of platforms including Linux and macOS. Hence, you must switch from Flash to HTML5 to make your website load faster and prevent user abandonment.
7) Switch from commercial to open source technologies
Flash is a proprietary and licensed multimedia platform. Hence, you have to incur additional expensed to embed video, audio, or animations to the website through Adobe Flash. On the other hand, HTML5 is both open source and open standard. Hence, you can easily reduce project overheads by switching from Flash to HTML5. It is also a great idea to build new websites with HTML5 to avoid updating them after 2020. Despite being an open standard, HTML5 will help you to keep the website relevant in the longer run.
On the whole, Adobe has already announced its decision to stop supporting Flash Player by 2021. Also, major web browsers have already started disabling Flash in phases. Hence, you should be migrating Flash to HTML5 to keep your website relevant and deliver richer user experience over a period of time. Also, HTML5 will help you to embed, improve, and manage videos without putting extra time and effort, while improving your website’s loading speed.