As we all know, Flash has been a really important part of the internet experience for quite a few years now. Unfortunately, flash has proven to have some serious down sides. Let's have a look at the pros and cons.
The good:
Interactivity
Actionscript - the flash programming language has made flash into a very powerful, interactive platform for internet content. The standard advert banner can be transformed into a user experience, with events being triggered when clicked on, or when a mouse is moved over them. With the importance of Facebook increasing, it has become a great platform for games developers to deliver flash based games to users. This market is expanding all the time, and it seems like a great way of making money.
A standardized site
With flash, there are no problems with browser compatibility. Flash animations will display the same, no matter what browser they are displayed in. As flash components are displayed by an Adobe plugin, they will always appear the same, regardless of the platform they are displayed on.
Better expression through animation
As flash is vector based, has a much smaller file size than comparable movie files, so it is great for web based animations. Load times are reduced, and the coding features allow you to leverage events, and timing.
The bad and the ugly:
The Flash player
Flash movies are displayed in the Adobe Flash player, which needs to be downloaded and installed before browsers can show the flash animations. This use to be a bit of a drag for many users, but the install procedure has improved over the years, and is very quick and causes minimal disruption to the browsing experience. However, if the user is suspicious of downloads, and refuses to perform the installation for Flash player, then your content isnt going to be shown. This is why some site owners refuse to use flash, and would prefer to use jQuery, which is more controllable in case of failure.
Site optimization
Be careful with the content that you show in your flash components. Search Engines cant read the contents of Flash files, and totally ignore them during indexing. If you have all of the main text headings and keywords in your flash animation, then your site is going to be on the skids with search ranking. Make sure you only show animation items that cant be displayed any other way. If you do use text in your animation, it may be a good idea to repeat it in the text body of the web page.
Loading time
Flash animations can take a few seconds to load up the first time they are viewed. This may not sound long, but it's long enough for a user to click on another link and find a more interesting page, or site. Make sure that the first scene in your flash animation is relatively short - Flash will load the first scene and start to show it, before loading the others.
Basically, with HTML5 around the corner, and jQuery being so good, it's probably best to avoid using flash in your website, unless you really need some sophisticated animation, or interactivity.
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