Pros and Cons of Using Flash for Banners

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