Month: January 2021

After a very long run, Adobe Flash is dead!

This was very long overdue for a variety of reasons. While Flash became almost ubiquitous on the web under Macromedia before being acquired by Adobe, it was also full of .
Apple never offered Flash on it’s mobile devices and helped to drive developers to make use of modern HTML5 to accomplish many of the same effects.
Flash “cookies” were buried deep within the application and were not easily removed by users making them very useful for tracking users.

Timeline:

Step Date
End of Life Announced July 25, 2017
End of support December 31, 2020
Flash blocked January 12, 2021

Support:

Browser Blocked Removed
Chrome 76 88
Firefox 69 85
Safari 14

 

HandheldFriendly meta tag – remove it!

This tag was originally used to identify mobile content in Blackberry and AvantGo browsers (on Palm devices), but became a general standard for identifying mobile websites. However, the marketshare for Blackberry and Palm has dropped significantly and it is doubtful that any modern browsers support this meta tag.

<meta name=”HandheldFriendly” content=”true”/>

REFERENCES:

ads.txt file

There are many files that crawlers expect to find in well-known locations on websites, one such file is ads.txt. While you might not have paid advertisements, crawlers may still look for a copy of this file leading to HTTP 404 errors in your logs. To prevent the error and show that you should have no advertisements leading there you can add the file with placeholder values as follows:

In the root of your website, create a new file with the name ads.txt.

#ads.txt - no DIRECT or RESELLER
www.example.com, placeholder, DIRECT, placeholder 
# NONE

NOTE: If you ever do use an advertiser, they will generally inform you as to changes to make to this file.

REFERENCES:

alexaVerifyID meta header?

This was once a service to aid webmasters with SEO, to claim a website you had to add content to your HTML. While Alexa still provides this service as a subscription, the use of the META tag is no longer required as support was dropped in May 2016!


<meta name="alexaVerifyID" content="your-verification-id-here" />