I have been reading that Adobe is stopping development of Flash for mobile devices (official announcement). If fact there have been many recent articles lately about the demise of Flash in general, they seem to argue that Flash is a ‘bad’ web technology and should be dumped in favour of HTML 5.
One of the reasons cited for Flash being bad was that it is used to create those annoying ads and banners. I think this is confusing the Flash technology itself with its usage – in other words blaming Flash when the real culprits are the purposes to which people have used it (or abused it).
As a former web developer, I remember that before Flash came along there were equally annoying popups and banners being produced using animated GIF’s. I suppose if Flash were to go away we would still be getting those annoyances using whichever is the current web animation technology of the day
Don’t get me wrong, I know that Flash technology does have real issues regarding stability, performance, etc – but then just about every web technology has its problems (including HTML when being used to create interactive web applications).
Luckily there are also other articles with a more balanced view, e.g. “Adobe Flash: Still the 800-Pound Gorilla”.