Yeah, you read that right – Adobe is finally killing off the multimedia platform Flash in 2020 – that’s just 2-3 years away, depending on exactly when in the year they pull the plug.
Now, Flash was one hell of an important plugin in the history of the internet – it gave a way for multimedia to be created and shared back when computer systems often couldn’t handle higher quality video clips, and was able to be downloaded in a reasonable time over dial up, when a video clip (even a tiny one) could an hour or more for even less total content.
https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html
It helped spawn multiple online content creator careers and many websites got their start thanks to it, including YouTube using it as the primary content delivery method for many years.
Of course, these days, it’s been supplanted with HTML5 and better video compression systems, along with high speed internet connections rendering flash somewhat pointless. Flash was quite the memory hog, in some usages, and also at times could be quite unstable.
What’s worse, flash was one hell of a security risk at varying times in its life. I don’t know exactly how or why flash would wind up being so exploitable, and capable of doing so much damage, but even I have fallen victim to the occasional flash-based exploit which screwed over my old computer back in, oh, maybe 2011-2012 range? At least, a flash based exploit is the most I can judge it to have been.
Actually, heck, here’s the most ancient of articles that describes it! https://www.xadara.com/a-reason-to-re-install-windows/ … Well, we can at least say I was excited to provide pictures during that article, right? Must have been back when most of what I wrote was text only… terrible text only, to boot, but that’s another story.
Anyway, Flash. It had its importance (there is even a Computer Chronicles episode that has a segment on Flash, back in the Macromedia days) but it’s lived its life and been supplanted by more capable, in the browser technologies.
I do have fond memories of making a flash animation with a friend back in high school, and some comedy that resulted from us not being able to get the timings right. I wish we still had that file, but that was, geeze, probably 16 or 17 years ago – it’s long gone and I don’t even have contact with that friend anymore to get it if it still did exist.
At least I have memories, right?
I might go into more detail on Flash in the future.
From what I’ve seen flash had slowly been replaced with HTML5 for quite a while and nowadays most online games use the Unity Webplayer. I wonder why they are waiting until 2020 though.
From what I can figure they want to give business, and whomever else may feel a *need* for flash time enough to get away from it.
It certainly has been replaced effectively by HTML5 and the like, but it isn’t gone from the web yet, especially in advertisements….