It looks like the end for Flash, something that is being welcomed by most software developers. Apple has announced that Safari’s browser will disable flash by default and now Google has closed down it’s Swiffy Flash conversion tool as the firm transfers all of its online ads to HTML5.
‘Today more consumers are using the web in HTML5-coompatible environments than Flash-compatible environments. In order to reach as large as an audience as possible we encourage everyone to transition to HTML5 authoring. We will continue to serve the Swiffy runtimes, so any file you convert before the sunset date will continue to play,’ Danial Klimkin, representing Google’s Adwords application programming interface (API) team, wrote in a blog post.
Swiffy first became available 5 years ago, initially as a Google Labs product. The goal at the time was to make Flash animations work on devices that didn’t have Adobe Flash installed.
Google has urged all software developers and advertisers still using flash to change, and use tools like Adobe animate or Google Web Designer to convert existing .swf files to HTML5, or use Mozilla Shumway to play an existing Flash SWF file in a browser.
Read the blog announcement here.
