Amazon Slams Door On Flash Ads Starting September 1
Amazon is the latest major tech company to kick Adobe's Flash platform to the curb. Effective September 1, 2015, the world's most popular online retailer will no longer accept Flash-based advertisements on its main site or through it's third-party Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP), the company announced this week. Interestingly, it's not Flash's history of security woes that prompted Amazon's decision.
"This is driven by recent browser setting updates from Google Chrome, and existing browser settings from Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari, that limits Flash content displayed on web pages," Amazon explained. "This change ensures customers continue to have a positive, consistent experience across Amazon and its affiliates, and that ads displayed across the site function properly for optimal performance."
In other words, Amazon is simply going with the flow. Back in July, Mozilla made the decision to block Flash content by default on all versions of its Firefox browser, and prior to that, Google tested a feature in Chrome that would automatically pause Flash content that was deemed unnecessary.
There's no denying that Flash has seen better days. The platform's decline began when Apple said it wouldn't support Flash on its mobile devices, and though Google toyed with a mobile version of Flash for Android, it never went anywhere.
In place of Flash-based ads, Amazon wants developers to use HTML5.
"This is driven by recent browser setting updates from Google Chrome, and existing browser settings from Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari, that limits Flash content displayed on web pages," Amazon explained. "This change ensures customers continue to have a positive, consistent experience across Amazon and its affiliates, and that ads displayed across the site function properly for optimal performance."
In other words, Amazon is simply going with the flow. Back in July, Mozilla made the decision to block Flash content by default on all versions of its Firefox browser, and prior to that, Google tested a feature in Chrome that would automatically pause Flash content that was deemed unnecessary.
There's no denying that Flash has seen better days. The platform's decline began when Apple said it wouldn't support Flash on its mobile devices, and though Google toyed with a mobile version of Flash for Android, it never went anywhere.
In place of Flash-based ads, Amazon wants developers to use HTML5.
