Flash Ends This Month and Something Will Break

What is actually happening

Adobe announced in 2017 that support for Flash would end at the end of 2020, which is now four weeks away.

The practical end came earlier. Browsers have progressively disabled it, and since the middle of 2019 the major ones have required an explicit click to run Flash content, once per session.

Almost nobody does that, which means anything on your site using Flash has been invisible to most visitors for well over a year.

What changes next month is that it stops being possible at all, rather than merely inconvenient.

What used Flash

• Image sliders and carousels on older sites.
• Video players, before browsers played video natively.
• Animated banners and intro sequences.
• Charts and interactive graphics.
• Games and configurators.
• Entire websites, on sites built before about 2012.

The last is the severe case. A site built entirely in Flash has been a blank rectangle to most visitors since 2019, and its owner may not know.

How to tell whether you are affected

Faster than it sounds, and worth doing this month.

Open your site on a current browser and look for anything blank, anything showing a placeholder, or any area where something used to move.

Check on a phone, where Flash has never worked at all, so a phone view has always shown what a browser will show from January.

That last point is the useful shortcut. If your site looks correct on a phone, it is almost certainly not affected.

Where something is missing on a desktop and also missing on a phone, that is what needs replacing.

A worked example

A business whose homepage had a rotating banner of five images across the top.

It had been built in 2011 and had worked fine for years.

What the owner saw, on a browser that remembered an old setting, was the banner working normally.

What everybody else saw was an empty grey area occupying the top third of the homepage, with the actual content pushed below it.

They had noticed traffic declining gradually and had attributed it to competition.

Replacing the banner with a single static image took an afternoon, and it should have been done eighteen months earlier.

Why the owner is the last to know

Worth understanding, since it explains how this persists.

The person who built or maintained the site may have enabled Flash permanently on their own machine years ago.

Browsers also cached that permission per site, so somebody who granted it once continued seeing the content working.

Which means the site appears correct to exactly the people who would notice a problem, and broken to everybody else.

The general lesson applies beyond Flash: check your own site in a private window, on a device you do not normally use.

What to replace it with

Nearly everything Flash did is now done natively and better.

Video plays in the browser without a plugin, and has done for years.

Sliders and animation are handled with ordinary web code, more lightly and on phones as well.

Charts have several free options that produce accessible, selectable output rather than an image.

Which means the replacement is usually simpler and faster than what it replaces, and frequently smaller.

The exception is genuinely interactive content such as a configurator, which is a rebuild rather than a substitution.

What happens to the addresses

A practical detail worth handling at the same time.

Where a whole site was built in Flash, it frequently had one address for everything, with the sections handled inside the Flash file rather than as pages.

Which means there is nothing to preserve: no page addresses, no accumulated search visibility, and nothing indexed beyond the single entry point.

That is a loss and it is also a clean start, since a rebuild creates the pages that should have existed all along.

For a partial replacement, where Flash sat on an otherwise ordinary page, the address stays and only the component changes.

The counter-case

Where the answer is simply to remove it.

An animated intro, which nobody has missed and which was a poor idea in 2008.

A banner rotating through five images, which almost always performs worse than one good static image.

Decorative animation with no informational content.

In each of those, deleting is better than replacing, and the page is improved by the removal rather than merely restored.

Which makes this a reasonable moment to ask whether the thing was worth having at all.

Old files left on the server

A tidying job worth doing at the same time.

Flash content lived in files with a particular extension, and those frequently remain on the server long after the page referencing them was rebuilt.

They do no harm sitting there and they are dead weight, and occasionally one is still linked from a page nobody has looked at.

Searching your site files for that extension turns them up in a few seconds, and anything not referenced can go.

The same search frequently turns up the original source files too, which are worth keeping somewhere off the server rather than deleting outright.

The wider point

Flash is the visible instance of something that keeps happening.

Technologies that a site depends on get retired, and the retirement is announced years ahead and then arrives anyway.

A site nobody looks at continues working until it does not, and the failure is discovered by a customer rather than by the business.

Which argues for a habit rather than a fix: looking properly at your own site, in a fresh browser and on a phone, a couple of times a year.

Twenty minutes, twice a year, catches this and most of the other things that break silently.

This month

1. Open your site on a phone.
2. Compare it against your desktop view.
3. Look for blanks where something used to be.
4. Check every page, not only the homepage.
5. Replace or remove what you find.
6. Ask whether it was worth having.

The fourth matters because Flash frequently survived on an interior page that nobody looks at, such as a gallery or a product demonstration.

Whatever you find, this is a deadline that has already been public for three years and arrives regardless of whether anybody prepared for it.

The broader version of this problem is covered in updating things without breaking them.

Frequently asked questions

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.