In an admission that Flash is no longer the dominant rich media and video format for content on the web, Adobe has rebranded its Flash Professional rich media editor as Adobe Animate CC, and is highlighting its capabilities in HTML5.
Although Adobe isn’t yet winding down support for the Flash format, it wrote in a blog post about changes to the Creative Cloud that it’s updating the Flash Pro brand to reflect that open standards like HTML5 have become the “dominant standard” on the web. Flash Pro has natively supported HTML5 (including HTML5 Canvas and WebGL) for some time, and Adobe now says that over a third of all rich media produced with Flash Pro is HTML5-based.
Adobe has been under pressure from security experts, technology partners and content developers to kill support for Flash, its proprietary rich media framework.
Critics point to the format’s lack of compatibility with mobile devices, performance issues and many security vulnerabilities. Flash remains the dominant vector for malware attacks, with Flash-based advertisements proving to be a particular problem — in the past two years, there’s been a spike in so-called malvertising attacks, which can infect browsers even if the user doesn’t actually click on a Flash ad.
In response, major media players like Amazon, Twitch.tv and the Google Display Network have all begun phasing out Flash ads. However, Canadian advertisers and agencies continue to depend on the entrenched format for rich media creative.
If Adobe does go all the way and pull its support for Flash, that could drastically speed up the transition. But that still seems far off, given that Adobe says Animate will still support Flash SWF and AIR formats as “first-class citizens” for the foreseeable future.
