Apple has been waging a fierce war against Flash ever since the iPhone debuted without the power to run Adobe’s battery hungry, multimedia software. Finally, seven years into the battle, Google is adding another blow by flagging Flash content in mobile search results with a warning that sites might not work properly.
Flash websites have been a common annoyance for mobile users who often just see a blank page when loading them, or see large chunks of content missing from a page, but now Google wants to help the web circumvent those frustrations by avoiding Flash whenever possible.
The search giant announced its added a feature to its algorithm that detects pages that use Flash so it can know whether to serve that site to you in search queries. As a result, iOS and Android devices will now see a warning for certain websites, stating that it uses Flash and may not work on your device.
iOS has never supported Flash since its introduction in 2007, while Google dropped Adobe Flash support with Android versions 4.1 and higher. iPhone users will still be able to just try the Flash site anyway, but with so much HTML 5 content available on the web, this might be the final blow in Flash’s long, sputtering death saga.
