Adobe Flash's long and painful demise continues with Google's announcement that Google Display Network will soon stop running Flash ads.

In a blog post shared on the AdWords Google Plus page, "Google Display Ads Will Be 100% To HTML5," Google said that "Google Display Network and DoubleClick Digital Marketing are now 100% shifting to HTML5 in order to enable more people to have a better browsing experience on more devices." "

Starting June 30, 2016, AdWords and DoubleClick will no longer allow flash-built ad uploads. Starting January 2, 2017, Flash ads will run neither on the Google Display Network nor doubleClick. Google will continue to provide advertisers with AdWords to help them transition to HTML5.

The change also affects Google's Flash-to-HTML5 tool, Swiffy, which will be used by no new ads starting in July 2016. Google recommends that users visit the AdWords Help page for more resource information on converting Flash ads to HTML5 ads.

Most communities weren't too surprised by Google's news, and many commenters welcomed the company's announcement.

Flash's future has been in doubt for some time. In 2015, InfoQ reported that Mozilla had blocked Flash "by default" in Firefox following Adobe's announcement of two major vulnerabilities. And InfoQ's research article , "Flash is under fire: Do you only use HTML5/JavaScript?" HTML5 received an 89% relevance rating, while Adobe Flash received a relevance score of less than 50%.

Clearly, Adobe also contributed to the end of Flash, which announced at the end of 2015 that it would rename Flash Professional as Animate CC to show that it would focus more on HTML5.

In November 2015, Rich Lee, Adobe's senior product marketing manager, wrote that more than a third of content created using Flash Professional uses HTML5. Lee said the tool has been completely rewritten over the past few years "to include native HTML5 Canvas and WebGL support" due to the adgencity of HTML5 and the need to take advantage of Web-standard animation.

In a february 8, 2016 confirmation of Animate CC's blog post, "Animate CC Is Coming," Lee said Animate was one of the company's "most significant releases to date" in addition to the name change.

It doesn't seem like a coincidence that the announcement coincides with Google's AdWords announcement. Animate's key features include "supporting HTML5 Canvas templates and allowing developers to customize them with any code editor (for example, developers can add scripts for Doubleclick or AOL tracking) and supporting Typekit integration with HTML5 Canvas documents." "

Other improvements and updates to Animate CC include replacing the dedicated libraries used in previous versions with the latest version of the Comened CreateJS library. Adobe says the goal of this change is to improve performance by reducing the number of server calls from published HTML5 Canvas output.

Animate also enhances the HTML5 Spritesheet UI, which provides separate control over PNG and JPEG settings that can be enabled or disabled. Animate content can also be imported into OAM (.oam) animation plug-in files from ActionScript, WebGL, or HTML5 Canvas.

The most recent update on the Adobe Flash runtime roadmap was in March 2015, and Adobe does not currently provide any closer information about flash's future. (infoq Chinese community)