Adobe’s Flash plugin might have had its place on the web years ago, but the last few years have been marked by a move away from Flash to more efficient technologies. Now the slow, painful death of Flash is continuing with Amazon announcing that it will no longer accept Flash ads on its ad network beginning September 1.

According to Amazon, recent updates to Chrome, Firefox, and Safari make Flash ads unreliable. Last month, Mozilla disabled the Flash plugin by default, citing security concerns. Likewise, Safari forces users to update the Flash plugin to the latest version or disable it completely. Flash is notorious for bogging down browsers due to its poor performance, so many users have simply taken to disabling it. When your goal is to get ads in front of people’s eyeballs, you want the ads to actually load.

Instead of Flash-based ads, developers can use HTML5 to introduce some interactive elements in ads, but nothing as extensive as what you can do with Flash. Of course, in the context of ads, the more extravagant uses of full motion video and expanding animations are supremely annoying. Maybe this is a good time to come up with more innovative ways to get people’s attention.

This is only the latest example of Flash’s decline. It all started when Apple steadfastly refused to support Flash on the iPhone and iPad. At the time there was more useful Flash content on the web, but as users increasingly used the web from mobile devices, content had to evolve. Android’s experiments with a mobile version of Flash did little to slow the transition as the plugin performed terribly on resource-constrained mobile devices. Adobe eventually abandoned the project.

With ads the last remaining bastion of Flash, Amazon’s decision to stop supporting the plugin is a big step toward ridding the web of it forever.