Amazon.com will stop accepting Flash ads on September 1

Amazon has decided to stop accepting Adobe Flash ads starting next month. The move, which goes into effect on September 1, affects not just the company’s website, but its whole advertising platform.

Flash is having a particularly bad year. In addition to all the usual security flaws it encountered, Google began automatically converting Flash ads to HTML5 in February. At the start of 2015, YouTube ditched Flash for HTML5 video by default and last month, Twitch announced plans to do the same.

Yet Amazon’s decision is primarily driven by browser makers curtailing what Flash can do. Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox have limited the plugin for a while now, but most recently, Google’s Chrome has also joined the party.

The details come from Amazon’s technical guidelines page (via Digiday) for its advertising options:

Beginning September 1, 2015, Amazon no longer accepts Flash ads on Amazon.com, AAP, and various IAB standard placements across owned and operated domains. This is driven by recent browser setting updates from Google Chrome, and existing browser settings from Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari, that limits Flash content displayed on web pages. 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.

In June, Google’s Chrome beta channel began automatically pausing less important Flash content to boost performance and battery life. The feature is enabled by default in Chrome beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Google expects to flip the switch for the Chrome stable channel in… you guessed it, September.

The death of Flash can’t come soon enough, both for performance and security reasons. In a way, Adobe ensured Flash’s death in November 2011, when the company announced the withdrawal of support for Flash Player on mobile devices. That said, despite the milestones we’ve seen so far this year, Flash will likely still be around in 2016 and beyond.