The End Of Adobe Flash Player
Adobe Flash is being discontinued on December 31st, 2020.
Adobe’s Flash software has been used for years for online videos, games and other web elements.
In recent years, Flash has become less and less important. Apple has stopped shipping Flash with Safari on the Mac since 2010, and iOS has never supported it.
Adobe Flash has repeatedly faced major vulnerabilities and the software has been exploited by criminals. Dozens of updates were released, but they were often not installed automatically, leaving an old vulnerable version installed on the computer.
This days websites use more secure and better-performing options such as HTML5, WebGL.
A Short History of Flash
In the mid-1990s, Macromedia acquired the FutureSplash Animator program and renamed it Macromedia Flash.
Macromedia was acquired by Adobe Systems on December 3, 2005
In 2007, Adobe’s first version release was Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, the ninth major version of Flash. It introduced the ActionScript 3.0 programming language, which supported modern programming practices and enabled business applications to be developed with Flash.
The ActionScript programming language allowed the development of interactive animations, video games, web applications, desktop applications
The Future
There are several initiatives to keep Flash alive, there is an open source emulator called Ruffle that supports old Flash files through a desktop app and a browser. The Internet Archive uses this emulator to store a thousand games and animations.
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