Flash banners (those of .swf extension) are becoming very common in Internet promotion – they are so frequently used because Macromedia Flash is a rather simple tool for producing complicated animation effects of fine quality.

Though, my experience shows that this type of banner has several drawbacks.

The first one is that leading browsers do not initially support Flash – additional plug-ins are required. Furthermore, it sometimes happens, that to view banners produced in later Flash versions, downloading newer plug-ins is needed.

Statistics show that 75% of users feature Microsoft Internet Explorers (data from www.w3schools.com) – most of them are users with basic skills that are less likely to download any upgrades.

In Macromedia Flash-animated banners, a delay is set between frames. In case the web-page visitor is using … a not very advanced machine, it is likely that wile loading the page the banner will also be loading slowly – the user will not get the necessary info from it, as he will not wait for the next frame to appear.

Another inconvenience of not only Flash banners, but also of Flash web-sites is that right-clicking on the link or banner does not offer an option to open it in a new window or in the same window.

This is often annoying, especially when about 15 windows are already opened – new window increases CPU usage.

Though Flash banners have some advantages in comparison with animated .gif banners, Flash banners use vector animation, thus a big-size banner occupies less memory than an ordinary one of the same size.

Actually, based on my experience, I can say that .gif animated banners can only be effectively used for small banners with 2-3 frames.

The major advantage of a Flash banner is the range of available colors . The .gif format offers a very limited range of only 256 colors – very little for a decent banner.

Flash provides a palette with a much wider choice of colors, and the quality of the banner improves immensely.

To conclude, I can only advise to use Flash for big-size banners (at least 468×60 pixels) or for pop up banners – then the quality does really matter. But to draw a small animated “button” 88×31 px, the usage of Flash will be obsolete.

Co-founder of Internet project First Banner Museum (http://www.firstbannermuseum.com/). Author with vast experience in web-design and Internet promotion.