The march of HTML 5 dominance across the web has received an arousing boost with the news that popular porn site Pornhub is dumping flash in favor of the open web standard.

Whereas porn usually leads when it comes to embracing new technologies, the decision by Pornhub to abandon Flash was a case where instead it was following others, in particular Google The search giant announced in August that it would begin removing all support for Flash in its market-leading Google Chrome browser from version 53 that was due to be released in September.

Pornhub does, however, lead the porn industry, with competitors including YouPorn, xHamster, and RedTube still relying on Flash to serve their content.

“It was just a matter of time until we switched, as HTML5 is becoming the standard across platforms. Now makes the most sense as Google and Firefox are slowly pushing Flash support out of their browsers. Plus HTML5 has improved security, better power consumption and it’s faster to load,” Pornhub Vice President Corey Price told Motherboard. “All adult sites should make the transition to HTML5. Flash is nearly dead.”

Security issues

The decision by Pornhub, Google and others to abandon support for Adobe’s longstanding multimedia Flash standard comes down to one main reason: security.

Always known as having more holes in it than a piece of Swiss Cheese, the tipping point that finally sped up HTML5 adoption (it was previously happening, but more slowly) came in June when Adobe patched a whopping 36 vulnerabilities in Flash. That included one that was a zero-day exploit allowing hackers to take full control of a remote computer, and was already believed to be exploited at the time it was patched.

Even Adobe itself no longer recommends people use its Flash player, and actually went as far killing of its Flash Professional animation software in January.

The move by Pornhub to abandon Flash may encourage the rest of the porn industry to follow suit, and likely other companies using the standard as well, eventually bring about the day, soon hopefully, where Flash will die once and for all.

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