Adobe Flash rides off into the sunset
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Adobe Flash LogoAdobe scheduled the end of support for its famous Flash software on December 31st, 2020, and today is the day. While Adobe won’t start blocking Flash content until January 12th, major browsers will shut it all down tomorrow and Microsoft will block it in most versions of Windows. It’s over.
Flash enjoyed huge cultural relevance and looms large in web history, which might be why its funeral procession has lasted for years. Browsers started showing Flash the door early in the last decade, and in 2015 Adobe asked developers to move on to HTML5. Things became official in 2017, when Adobe announced it would end support.
While Adobe is finally (mercifully) letting Flash go, it will live on in many historical artifacts. The Internet Archive is preserving Flash games and animations, including well-known hits like “Peanut Butter Jelly Time.”
I personally loved making stuff in Flash as a high school student with a totally-legitimate copy of the Adobe software on my generic HP desktop PC. Years later, any time I see some fancy words slide into a corporate presentation, I recall struggling to figure out how to animate motion tweens in the Flash editor. Ah, memories.
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There are 50 comments.
(Sorry to Nilay who banned the "rides off into the sunset" headline years ago. It just seemed right for Flash.)
For me? Flash is Homestar Runner and animations of stick figures fighting each other in increasingly gruesome ways.
What’s your best Flash memory?
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 12:45 PM
accidentally downloading McAfee every time I added it to a PC.
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 12:53 PM
So much of my child life was my friends browsing newgrounds… feels like yesterday though so much has changed…
Posted on Jan 3, 2021 | 2:59 PM
Many online Flash games over the years, but especially several from LEGO, and mostly for BIONICLE, especially Mata Nui Online Game I and II. Also the BIONICLE Flash animations from 2001 to 2004. Those and the aforementioned two games were works of art.
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 1:07 PM
Wasn’t there a lego game where you were an intern for a movie studio? Or did I dream that bizarre premise up?
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 2:11 PM
That was a Shockwave game called Backlot. It was cute, and had good music. 
You can download it for offline play from BioMedia Project (along with most other old LEGO games).
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 6:37 PM
Man, BIONICLE brings me BACK. I’m sure my mom still has them in storage.
Posted on Jan 1, 2021 | 11:21 AM
zombo.com
Also the animation the Philadelphia Eagles made for each game …
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 3:13 PM
I bought into the early Android ecosystem because iOS did not support Flash. Ah, the days when I would lord over my pathetic iPhone friends, showing them how I could load up the "whole world wide web" in the browser (I forget if Chrome mobile existed back then). That novelty wore off quickly, especially when my iOS pals would show me all the good apps that Android didn’t have yet.
Good times.
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 4:13 PM
I started my professional career as a Flash Developer after grad school. That eventually turned into mobile dev, but ill always have a soft spot for Flash. My Master’s thesis was a flash game.
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 4:35 PM
Using a banned headline for a banned product – seems about right!
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 5:42 PM
I produced a lot of Flash-based minisites for a very well known video game company some years ago… a lot of them were really cool and not stuff you could easily do with any other technology, even today. I just went back to check their site to see if any of it’s still up (it’s old enough that I thought they may have just left it there neglected) but nope, it’s all been replaced with standard HTML. And it’s all now really, really boring. Just some box art and screenshots.
In a way it feels like going backwards. Flash wasn’t perfect but surely there should be a better replacement for it than HTML5.
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 6:16 PM
Yep, lots of stick figures doing battle. My favorite Flash animation of all time is Animator vs Animation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npTC6b5-yvM
If you’re familiar with the UI of Flash (and having participated in the original design, I certainly am), the in-jokes are hilarious.
Flash had a big impact on the early days of indie game development. For that alone, it will always occupy a niche in the history of tech and software.
-Charlie Jackson
Posted on Jan 1, 2021 | 12:51 AM
When I was 11 my friend and future college roommate started making flash games and posting them online in our computer periods/lunchtimes at school.
The games quickly became a point of pride for the school and we were given nearly total free reign to make our games and skip class and other students got a lot more leeway to play them in class than they would other distractions.
Eventually I started a new series of shooter gallery type games inspired by the violent "Madness" series of flash animations. The school asked us to censor out art. We said no and never made a game again. Good times.
Posted on Jan 3, 2021 | 10:24 PM
Like when Geocities was killed, a lot of internet history is going to be lost. Flash had a very interesting period in animation and games in the 2000’s decade. Hope people are saving this things.
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 1:43 PM
It’s in the article, internet archive will preserve a lot of it
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 2:23 PM
The saddest thing is that there is no replacement for web animation.
Flash animations were easy to produce and could stream over a 28 Kbps modem. This is why they became so abused.
For all the HTML5/CSS3/SVG/JS tools that we have now, creating an animation (as in, not a video) is tedious. Lottie is probably the most advanced solution and it’s still 20 years behind.
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 2:02 PM
It’s not actually the animation part that was abused. That part of Flash has always been mostly fine.
Once Flash supported VP6 that’s where the misuse began. It ended the codec wars and become a defacto standard almost overnight. Now people used it as a container for everything because they knew that basically every person on the internet had it installed, so why not.
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 2:24 PM
You know you can still use Adobe Animate (née Flash) to create animations, right?
Posted on Jan 1, 2021 | 2:05 PM
There’s Adobe Animate and Tumult Hype. Hype is as easy to use as Flash or Shockwave ever was. Animate is more advanced and maybe a bit steeper learning curve.
So the tools are there.
Posted on Jan 2, 2021 | 3:08 AM
The deep hatred of Flash that so many have isn’t unreasonable…but it was so cool when I was a kid. Nothing really ever replaced it with that exact combination of ubiquity and ease of use (no, it was never perfect, but still).
I want to see all the developers who have nostalgia for Hypercard and for Flash come together and make something amazing that brings the best of both into the modern era…
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 2:16 PM
I’ve many memories of flash content and games, if I had to name a favourite flash game it would be the Yeti Sports series, in particular the 4th and 5th one. The younger me spent a lot of time on those!
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 3:38 PM
I started using Flash when it was still Future Splash. Wound up being in that great collective of artists and developers back in the late 90s and early 00s. Made a lot of friends, learned a ton and effectively kicked off my career thanks to it.
I made a lot of the big crazy movie sites yall saw from about 2004-2012. The last one I built was for the remake of "Evil Dead." Wrapped it up at the end of 2012 and it went live in January of 2013, I think. By then, I’d pretty much gone full on into iOS development but little did I know that would be the last Flash project I’d ever work on.
Godspeed, old friend. You paid for all the vices of my youth.
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 5:06 PM
The only time I thought flash was pretty cool was when I visited the 2advanced.com website for the first time. https://web.archive.org/web/20020604062250/http://www.2advanced.com/flashindex.htm Ah flash is blocked on my browser, I can’t relive the good old memories.
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 6:48 PM
Miniclip, Newgrounds, and AddictingGames were a huge part of my childhood
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 8:29 PM
Well, there goes Crunchyroll and their shitty video players.
Posted on Dec 31, 2020 | 8:52 PM
Flash was shitty unresponsive advertisements and webgames. Like, having good memories of it because it powered youtube at one point is just misremembering the reason it died: no one wanted the Adobe Flash Player.
Posted on Jan 1, 2021 | 8:47 AM
Sorry, but nonsense. Flash allowed to do a huge amount of things which were not possible in any other technology back then, so due to that it was used for a huge amount of things.
That some of those things were annoying/negative like annoying ads is just a side effect of it being usable for so many things and also the best option for so many things.
It was also used for tons of positive things and also in a huge amount of positive ways.
Just to list some basic examples:
-It allowed to have fullscreen smooth animations in true color range in in comparison tiny filesize
(because one could have png and jpg compression for images next to using anti aliased vector graphics and the whole thing would on top then also be essentially zip compressed).
What is the alternative to this in 2021?
Simple, there is still no proper alternative to this even in 2021!
One either can use video (bigger filesize, zero interactivity in comparison) or gif animations (256 colors only, no nice gradual transparency, bad compression, so extremely bloated filesize in comparison).
So yes, there is in fact still no viable feature complete alternative to these features even in 2021.
The only reason most people don’t notice this huge loss meanwhile is because most people meanwhile have such a massively faster connection, that they don’t realize what a huge filesize waste those other "alternatives" are.
Back in the earlier days of the public internet those huge advantages mattered way more because most people had very slow connections and even in most places had to pay per minute.
Now? People don’t notice what a ridiculous waste of fileize a several MB big gif file is (which on top looks ass because 256 colors only and bad compression etc)
One could go on and on like that, it allowed to have super crisp anti aliased fonts of any size, which only came to browsers without plugins years later.
That it was the offset for most good web video and conferencing platforms.
That it was the offset for many popular game series and game developers and also was used in most triple A games UI and other places for many years.
(And even the big game engines like Unity and Unreal still have no as good replacement for many aspects in which flash was great)
One could go on about so many of the upsides, where for many it took many years for html/js to catch up, and as i mentioned with just one important example above, for many strengths of flash other options still have not caught up in 2021 and also won’t catch up for another few years at least.
But yeah, then there are still people who bought into the simpleton flash is all bad, it was good it was killed and hey, html/js is so totally ready to be a great replacement back then and still think it is now, despite it had been proven over and over that no, totally not the case.
The reality is Adobe after taking over flash mismanaged it, never got gpu acceleration going for the parts flash excelled at, so it was limited to run on the cpu for most of those aspects it was actually exceptional for, and that’s the main reason why it got a bad rep on performance side, while it is actually incredible how good it ran already on cpu alone (and people had shitty cpus back hen compared to now)
Then came the campaign by Jobs and html/js pundits happily jumped on board, and there was disappointment by lots of flash users about how progress was going under Adobe while at the same time appealing other options coming up like Unity for 3D and multi platform stuff and app store as hyped up new release option, and all of those came together in a perfect storm to end flash.
What is even worse than "just" flash getting killed off, again, a solution of which we still don’t have good replacements for most of the features it excelled at so many years later,
worse, it is really sad because the campaign to kill off flash was basically just the first step to then kill off all browser plugins, which also meant killing off ones like Unity web player, which allowed to make 3D stuff on so, so much better level than with webgl/web assembly even today, it is not even funny to compare.
It is like having the whole web technology and possibilities range pushed back like 2-3 console generations to give a basic simplified comparison example.
But yeah, some will still insist in semi/uninformed way it is for the better, while still in 2021 we don’t have an even just halfway as good replacements.
Where is the web technology which loads as fast, allows as small filesize for the same content as flash and allows 3d stuff on a level like unity web player etc while also running on all those browsers etc?
Not there.
In current (again, many console generations behind as a simpleton comparison) web technology, one can be happy if one gets higher end 3d features support and multithreading support, more proper usage of the system resources etc maybe in like another 3 years.
(Like pretty much all attempts of getting even just multithreading stuff going like sharedarray buffer etc were each time either not implemented/enabled by all browsers or then again disabled after security exploits reasoning), so just in case someone doesn’t know, most if not all of major web content stuff runs single core right now, so just based on that imagine what that means, when did you last time have a single core computer? How many years that is behind.
Or how little of the memory one can use properly in webgl/webassembly, that is like being limited to a 10 year old computer.
Not even to speak of all the other graphics card features/3d api features and many other features which one could use with those plugins which one can’t use now, so how many years it has pushed back things.
It was a play to kill off plugins to establish a new platform which couldn’t run them well and also establish closed walled garden app stores and kill off most other more in depth content sources in one fell swoop.
Steve Jobs was brilliant in many ways and brought us things like the modern smartphone and tablet a few years earlier (at least) than we would have otherwise, but to be clear: he was also an asshole on many ends who would put out at best half truths many times to ruthlessly kill off competition and any other options. And that’s one of the major prime examples for that.
And in many cases it took many years for the actual truth making it through.
And lots of people still don’t get that so many years later because when one is not a dev who worked on all that stuff and also tried all those alternative options which came up since and each time promised to be THE proper solution which has all the bling now, and each time it was not, yeah, if one isn’t such a dev, one maybe doesn’t even realize how much our tech progress was pushed back and limited on that and is still in pushed back many years more limited state now.
The web became a massively more limited, many, many years pushed back way more shite to develop for option and it is a huge loss with flash and all the other plugins gone, sad so many still don’t know it now, else maybe there would be a bigger push to at least get those major strengths those plugins had into non plugin based web tech faster, but since app stores are so much more important for content delivery today and also internet connections are so much faster and also our computers are in average so much better, a lot of people just don’t realize on how much of a worse level all of this stuff operates on now and how much worse usage of filesize/bandwidth and system resources it makes now.
Posted on Jan 2, 2021 | 9:52 AM
I remember when Flash first introduced streaming video; it was shocking how good it was.
Posted on Jan 1, 2021 | 11:10 AM
I see things. I see them with my eyes. I see things. They’re often in disguise.
Posted on Jan 2, 2021 | 2:57 AM
I remember when the first iPhone launched, and how it was "doomed" to fail due to lack of support for Flash. It’s hard to imagine now, but back then it was almost unheard of having a video or any form of media on a website without using Flash. It was still the default way to play videos on Youtube on desktop for many years after.
Posted on Jan 1, 2021 | 1:01 PM
Hahah Yep. I was a Flash developer back then and was like … oh man, this ain’t good. When Apple opened up the App Store for 3rd party development I was like … I HAVE to get into this or I’m gonna be unemployable in a couple years.
Potentially the best career decision I’ve ever made.
Posted on Jan 1, 2021 | 10:21 PM
I was one of those former (also) flash devs who jumped on board the iPhone hype train back then.
While it was a good decision in general to explore other technologies and platforms and that attitude of always trying out other technologies/platforms (like i also got into Unity, C# etc etc) allowed me to always get into better bigger things later on, the iOS App Store has devolved into a complete free to play/subs enforced cesspool and it is a shame, so i meanwhile stay clear of releasing stuff on it as much as possible.
For the huge potential it had back then, it was also clearly (intentionally) mismanaged to turn into something really quite crappy.
Posted on Jan 2, 2021 | 9:56 AM
Definitely truth here. App Store definitely isn’t the same as it was in the early days.
I launched my first app in … man, 2010? 2011? Just a simple little quiz game with a leaderboard. At 99 cents, it got to pulling in a good ~$5k/mo for a long time. Used to have a screenshot of it being in the top 10 for games for a bit. Nice little addition to my full-time Flash dev job.
But yeah … that’d be impossible now. I’ll build and release little silly things anymore, mainly to just learn whatever’s new (most recent was just to dive in and learn SwiftUI and homescreen widgets) but yeah. Meanwhile, I’m just the iOS lead for a decently known company. If I hadn’t picked up iOS … man, I dunno what I’d be doing now. Cuz I always HATED browser front end and my server side skills are stuck in like 2002 haha.
Posted on Jan 2, 2021 | 11:14 PM
I feel Adobe blew it with ActionsScript 2.0.
Most of the Flash animations and games we remember fondly were created with Flash v5 or the feature set available in Flash v5. It was focused on animation and games, and relatively easy to program for animators and creators without a programming background.
With ActionsScript 2.0 (Flash v7), Adobe tried to create a Java clone. Flash lost focus, as Adobe added UI Widgets and back-end support geared to productivity applications. It was at this point Flash became unwieldy for Adobe to support for stability and security.
I feel Flash might still be with us if Adobe took a different route after Flash 5… If Adobe kept Flash’s focus on animation and games, and evolved the rendering engine and mobile support instead of creating an unweildy scripting engine, Flash might be more relevant today, and much easier to keep secure. Of course hindsight is 20/20.
Posted on Jan 2, 2021 | 10:14 AM
While you’re right that already Actionscript 2 was less accessible to animators and creators without a coding background, i don’t feel like that was the point (yet) where Adobe fully blew it on coding side (though it was the first sign of their actual issue they couldn’t solve, more on that further below). Why? Because with AS 2 the flash player was still basically backwards compatible in the same project/content to the degree where one could also still use AS1 for most stuff if one wanted to.
The real fail on coding side came with Actionscript 3 because then the player did not act backwards compatible in same way within the same content piece so one then would have to code all in AS3 and then on top they only made deploy to other platforms like iPhone when that came up be doable via Adobe Air way and for AS3 content, so that meant millions of games and other apps which were made in AS1/2 could not be deployed there without basically recoding them from scratch.
So that was the biggest failed opportunity for Adobe and flash content creators, because if that "simple" mistake would not have been made, basically most of the early app store hits would have been flash based and that would have helped flash’s rep, reduced Apple’s bashing on it etc.
But of course there is more to it, they could not allow that because the performance would have been too low because the actual big fails on Adobe side were things like
-they lost the fella who made the original brilliant vector graphics renderer (and most other parts of original flash really) and they never figured out how to rewrite it to make use of the gpu all that time, same for most other original great parts of flash, so that’s why it ran only on the cpu.
And that’s why it ran poorly on platforms which had a very weak cpu back then (compared to computers) like the original first few iPhones and other mobile devices.
And since Adobe could not solve the big bottleneck on graphics side of not running on the gpu for all those things that made flash great (and solving that would have brought a many times over 100 x performance improvement), they instead tried to argue devs into changing their coding ways to more strict oop ways to get (only/tiny) performance increase of 10-30% on code execution side.
So many devs jumped into AS3 not even question Adobe much initially, but yes, many creatives and non coders were completely alienated and even among devs, over time more and more of them started to wonder why one has to code in different way to get such tiny perf improvement while other things came up like Unity where back then one could even code in Unityscript (javascript 1 similar syntax) and run awesome 3d things (since running on the gpu for the graphics stuff).
(Only years later Adobe made a new api to use the gpu with, but it was way too late, way too limited and basically could not be used for any of the existing features and workflows flash was great at, so it was too little, too late and misguided, again).
So all the "course corrections" Adobe did basically just pushed people more to other options and made other options more appealing (and even easier to switch to then, too, it was quite the easy transition for me for example to Unity since Unityscript was close to AS1 and 2 and AS3 close to C# in many ways)
Sadly i see this same kind of mistakes made now again and again with other platforms, like the Unity fellas not getting performance up in cross platform well usable way on graphics side enough and then they are instead pushing for devs "just" changing their whole coding way to lower level way (this time from oop ways to way more low level data oriented approach of thinking how the computer manages memory and hence coding in a way where memory management is faster)
and throwing away basically all the aspects and features the engine is great in and the great cross platform approach of one engine and project base for all platforms and scaling from lowest to highest in one setup, to instead having to
choose up front which platforms one deploys to and then picking a render pipeline/materials/shaders/post processing etc which only works with that render pipeline and basically all asset store and own content libs and engine features etc have to be thrown away and remade from scratch.
Huge fail and i get saddened when people don’t learn of such great failures in tech industry and repeat them slightly different, but essentially repeating largely the same kind of mistakes,
totally missing what the thing was great at and excelled at and thinking it is great to throw that all away and force all to start over in worse way from scratch while loosing all those points the thing excelled at, again and again and destroying things with great power, reach and so well usable cross platform by so many users, all the way from non coders, graphics professionals over to devs etc.
No, let’s all break it apart and force people to throw away tons of their long made projects libraries and coding and creation workflows and force them to a single bad choice per development target and change their whole coding ways because you as a platform/tech creator don’t get the issues fixed properly in ways the user should not have to care about or even notice.
Big bummer on that end because it wasn’t made once with flash and all learned from it, no, it is repeated again now.
Posted on Jan 2, 2021 | 10:41 AM
Macromedia is a sole reminder how Adobe ruins everything it touches because it became so big for its own sake in year 2000 going forward.
Posted on Jan 3, 2021 | 5:11 AM
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