The era of Flash is over and that is a shame
As the new year begins, we officially close the era of Adobe Flash Player with a worthy farewell to this Internet veteran.
As of today it is official: Flash is no more. The Adobe plugin has long been largely irrelevant. Now that the bullet is really through the church, at least a certain melancholy arises in me. Adobe Flash Player shaped the internet as we know it today and can therefore be seen with a virtual salute!
Adobe Flash Player is no more
Earlier this month, Adobe released an update for the web plugin Flash Player for the last time. You know, those annoying updates you kept getting in and out and apparently didn’t change anything. Still, we shouldn’t just put the plugin away as an annoying piece of code; it was partly responsible for the internet as we know it today.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, just about every interesting feature ran on Flash; videos, browser games and the first social media made use of the plugin. Adobe also realizes this very well, according to a blog post in which they thank all their users.
We would like to take a moment to thank all our customers and developers for using Flash Player and creating great content with it over the past two decades. We are proud of the critical role Flash has played in evolving the web in terms of animation, interactivity, audio, and video.
They rightly say that, because game websites like NewGrounds, cultural phenomena like Habbo Hotel and social platforms like Hyves would never have existed without Flash.
At the same time, Flash has for years been criticized for its possible lack of security. According to many (including a critical Steve Jobs) Adobe Flash Player did not work well on smartphones. In recent years, this has ensured that all major platforms that still used Flash have switched to alternatives.
In short, herewith a worthy farewell to a (sticking around a bit too long) plugin that formed the internet. As announced, Adobe Flash Player will be permanently blocked from January 12, 2021.
