Yeah yeah, Apple doesn't like it, it causes battery life problems etc. etc. Whatever.
Those are not the things that will kill Flash. Google has done it.
The new Google Instant and Google Preview have been seen as some pretty nifty improvements to the search engine. In fact, I think it may be the most profound change we've seen in an incredibly long time.
First, from an SEO perspective, positions 3..7 in a 10-block are now pretty meaningful again because with Preview you can quickly roll down through all the results and see the sites before you visit. Here's the big hit: ugly sites will no longer get visited. You'd better have a pretty nice looking page with a call to action and exactly what Im looking for or I'll not even give you a one click quickie.
Which leads to Flash. It shows up as a big empty box in preview. Check out a site that is almost all flash ... There's nothing to see in preview. Yeah man, that'll help your traffic. The more flash on the page ... The worse the preview looks. Provided you've done your HTML5 right, it shows up beautifully as preview/banner/default/graceful degrade at the least. Flash? Your Alt text.
Some might argue that Preview is just a fad. I say it's the next evolution. Fewer clicks to get what I want, don't even need to go to something that looks like spam. Google has made it that you'll only see that cool Flash nav effect if you make it to the site ... And with Preview you are less likely to
because of that cool Flash nav effect.
HTML5 now already accounts for 55% of all video shown on the web. There's still a lot of entrenched Flash that will take quite awhile before it goes away. But there's nothing like a drop in traffic and sales to incentivize people to change ... And when "webmasters" (
) figure this one out they will drop flash in a skinny minute.
