7 Drawbacks of Flash

Adobe Flash is popular among designers and creators working with animations and media. Source code is secured and interactivity is guaranteed. Through incorporating Flash, the customized website will be lightened up by mobile and interactive components. But believe it or not, there are a number of drawbacks to this amazing software. We would recommend that you do not use Flash for the site’s menu, nor should you use it for the whole website.

Not Search Engine Friendly: Google and Yahoo search engine just able to read Flash files, their developers have done put lots of efforts in configuring the flash movie. There are still many constraints in some aspects, like what links search engines can crawl or index. This shows the search engines may not pick up the text which contained within the flash, hence, it prohibits search engines to be found and list essential content to your customers. So Google still recommends people to use Flash sparingly.

Immobility: In this society where we are highly mobilized (around 4.1 cellulars in 2008), it is disappointing when we cannot browse some information using mobile phones and iPhones just because we do not have Flash installed as Flash is not designed for mobile phones, or even iPhones as Apple has not yet got into cooperation with Adobe.

Lack of Consistent Cross-Platform Support: Some people may think adding HTML tags to a document is already very fussy, when they know about insertion of Flash, they certainly will go mad. You need JavaScript support in order to help assist some browsers in loading the web-pages.

Flash Player Required: To view a Flash animation, you will have to install an Adobe Flash Player downloaded from the Adobe website. There is always the possibility that people decide not to install the player on their computers and miss out on useful information on your site.

Difficulty To Access: People who have vision impairments or who are using text reader without MAJOR modifications cannot access Adobe Flash. Without modifications, Flash sites cannot be read. Flash is not Section 508 Compliant which most government and higher education websites are equipped with.

Cost: The worst point of Flash is expensive. It is a costly software which is about $700. After paying for the software, you still need to pay for the upgrades to the latest versions, this is certainly unreasonable for small business owners and web developers. In contrast, HTML is highly affordable.

Flash does help in many situations, but it is of importance to know its limitation when you want to utilize it to build your websites or when you are selecting a web developer.