The days of Flash are numbered. Chrome blocks Flash content by default since version 76 (released in July 2019), Firefox since version 69 (September 2019), and Google has announced it will stop indexing SWF files by the end of 2019. The final nail in the coffin will come later in 2020, when Adobe officially end-of-lifes the Flash Player.
According to W3Techs, only about 3 percent of all websites utilize Flash nowadays. This doesn’t sound like very much, but considering the huge number of websites on the web, it still means that millions of sites rely on Flash. If your website is among them, it’s definitely time to act!
The first step in migrating a website away from Flash is identifying the pages that need to be updated. In this post I will demonstrate how to use Dr. Link Check to crawl a website in order to find all SWF files and the pages linking to them.
Click here to navigate to the Dr. Link Check home page, enter the address of your website into the input field, and click the Start Check button.
The service immediately starts crawling through your website, which may take a while. Once the crawl is complete, click the All Links item in the sidebar on the left.
Click the Add button in the Filter bar, select URL from the drop-down menu, enter .swf into the input field, and press Enter to confirm the input.
The list will now only display links containing “.swf” in their URL. In order to see the pages linking to the Flash file, hover over the link and click the Details button.
Although Dr. Link Check is primarily a broken link checker, its flexibility also makes it an excellent tool for finding specific files on a website. You can not only use it to search for Flash, but also for Java, Silverlight, or any other type of content that’s identifiable by filename. Give it a try!
