Amazon is helping to kill off Flash for good

The knife in Adobe Flash’s chest has been pushed a little closer to its heart today when Amazon announced its plans to drop support for Flash ads on its advertising network. The latter format is more mobile-friendly and given the dramatic increase in the dependence on mobile devices as of late, it is perhaps not that surprising that the now-obsolete Flash player is being slowly phased out of our systems.

“This change ensures customers continue to have a positive, consistent experience across Amazon and its affiliates, and that ads displayed across the site function properly for optimal performance”, the company said in a statement on its technical specs page.

Google’s Chrome, for example, blocks playback of “non-essential” Flash content. Translation: Flash ads on webpages won’t play.

The move comes on the heels of July’s massive Yahoo “malvertising” attack, which exploited a vulnerability in Flash to hijack the computers of Yahoo users. While Mozilla chose to disable its Flash plugin by default last month over security concerns, Safari, on the other hand, forced its users for updating their Flash plugin or disable it completely.

The online retailer made the announcement after a number of browsers, including Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox, were updated to cut down on use of the troubled platform. Amazon owned less then one percent worldwide market share of digital ads in 2014, according to eMarketer.

Lack of support for the Adobe Flash plug-in on iOS garnered much attention around the launch of the iPad five years ago as the full-sized tablet browser was criticized for presenting holes on the web where Flash content otherwise would be. Although the end result might not be as extensive as it used to be in case of Flash, but maybe that change is good. Web advertising, however, was an area Flash still dominated, at least for desktops.