Usage of Adobe Flash on the internet has been on the decline for sometime now and most users view that as a good thing. Flash, while being a great technology, has proven problematic over the years. There have been countless security vulnerabilities, endless updates from Adobe, and many fake versions that have compromised unsuspecting users. Now, the folks over at HTTP Archive have added one more reason to the growing list of why Flash is bad.
They recently conducted a study of the response, or download, time for some prominent web site features including Flash, Javascript, HTML, CSS, and several different image formats. The results probably aren’t really that surprising in the sense that most of us already knew that Flash could be slow and cumbersome. However, just how much slower than virtually all of the other web technologies, may come as a bit of a shock. Flash is almost 4 times slower than the second slowest technology, JPEG. The chart they published, which can be seen below, shows the “average response size” in kilobits (kb).
Flash was once the darling of the internet, but it has slowly been replaced by newer, more efficient, technologies that can bring dynamic content to web sites with much better performance.
Source: HTTP Archive is a site that analyzes thousands of web pages each month to get these types of statistics.