Adobe Flash was a miracle when it launched about 25 years ago but, as with all innovations, it has been superseded and finally laid to rest in January 2021. Here is my eulogy to Flash.
Flash has been a core part of many websites and applications for decades but you may not have known you were using it. Web designers and software developers used Flash to make websites pretty and Flash animations were often very small in size; perfect for the world of dial-up internet. Flash content could have been a small menu, or video clip, or a fully playable game.
The BBC made extensive use of Flash throughout their site and all the content and videos on the iPlayer was Flash. At one time YouTube also used Flash to render videos. Flash was not limited to websites, there were many Flash applications written for computers, mostly educational titles and games, but also some printer control apps and tech tools to manage routers.
Flash came with a host of problems. It was easy to exploit and many viruses and malware spread through Flash. It was also unkind to battery life due to inefficient use of graphics; Apple famously refused to allow Flash apps to run on its mobile devices, so when the iPhone and iPad became King, Flash was beheaded. Google stopped the Flash plugin from running in its Chrome browser a few years ago, but you could still turn it on manually up to January 2021.
Adobe has kept Flash alive for 10 years longer than it really should have. It was kept updated up to January ’21 but it has now been decommissioned and will no longer run without a lot of trickery. This has forced many website owners to update and rewrite their sites (hopefully this has been done in advance, if you’re the owner of a more classic website, then check it still works correctly.)
Any installed applications using Flash will no longer work and often the developers are long-gone, so there is no hope of updates. This has affected lots of printer and scanner programs and some educational programs too. If you run a program and see a blank white space then it was probably Flash. You can attempt to contact the original supplier but don’t hold your breath.
Flash has been replaced with more modern programming languages like Java, HTML5 and WebGL. If you have Flash installed on your computer then Adobe recommends you remove it. R.I.P. Flash