End of life for Flash viewer

[Jared Friedman]

Three years ago, Scribd announced that it would be migrating from a Flash viewer to an HTML5 viewer:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/05/scribd-html5/

Since then, we've continued to support the Flash viewer while focusing our development resources on improving the HTML5 viewer.  Three years later, though, the Flash viewer has become a maintenance burden for us, so we will be fully end of life-ing it shortly.  

If you are currently using Scribd's viewer, you most likely do not need to do anything.  When we do the switch, we will seamlessly upgrade any remaining Flash viewers to the HTML5 version in place, without any code changes on your side.

However, we do recommend that you upgrade on your own side pro-actively so that you can control the roll out.  This is very easy.  Just follow the instructions on this page to make sure that your Javascript is using the latest version of our JS AP (version 2).  You also want to be sure that you are including the latest Javascript API file - http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/scribd_api.js.

For the most part, the HTML5 viewer is at feature parity with the Flash viewer.  However, there are a couple of features which we either could not port due to technical reasons (printing support is the biggest one here), or chose not to port, like in-doc search.  Unfortunately, there is no current solution for these features, so if they are essential for your application you will need to find another option.

We are planning to do the full switch off on May 1.  Please address questions and concerns to sup...@scribd.com.

Jared

[phili...@gmail.com]

Is there any update to this? Have you all decided to continue to support flash? I'm new to the api and would like to use the flash viewer for search highlighting support. Thanks.

Philip

[Jared Friedman]

Hi Philip,

We decided to postpone the shut-down but will definitely do so at some point.  You should not use the Flash viewer for any new project as we will be end-of-lifing it shortly.

Jared