Despite the somewhat ominous title of this post, this is exactly what’s happening.

The demise of Flash has been happening ever since Apple turfed Flash from the iOS platform, and then Google took Flash out of Chrome.  And now it is our our turn,  we have eradicated Flash from the ANOW application.   

What is Flash and why do you care?

Flash is a wonderful Adobe plugin that pops up every now and then when you visit certain websites and / or in certain desktop programs. We will avoid the obtuse technical description; but if you are so inclined a quick visit to wikipedia can refresh on the technical history and attributes of Flash.  Suffice to say, Flash was commonly used for animations, games or videos and was very common not that long ago.  More importantly, under the cover of night,  while no one was looking Flash code crept in and found a home in a few of the modules inside of ANOW.

So why did we kill Flash use in ANOW?  Its time has passed. It’s buggy. It crashes a lot. It doesn’t work on most mobile devices. It’s a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and antiquated web technology. Websites that rely on Flash present a inconsistent (and often unusable) experience for fast-growing percentage of the users who don’t use a desktop browser.  

More importantly technology improved and HTML5 became best practice for web apps for speed, security and multi-browser capability.

So we replaced all use of Flash code in ANOW with HTML5.  Hopefully you don’t even notice as you will just take for granted how much smoother and quicker ANOW is working for you.