(Newswire.net — January 2, 2021) —
Adobe Flash Player, a plugin for internet web browsers, is now no longer supported.
Developed in the early days of the internet, when bandwidth was a significant issue, the plugin was used for animations, games and other interactive content.
Adobe, the company responsible for developing and updating the Flash Player, announced that they will no longer be supporting or updating that software starting January 1, and they have asked users to uninstall the plugin from their devices since all Flash content will be blocked on January 12.
Initially released in 1996, the Flash Player grew in popularity since it allowed interactive animations that used little bandwidth – meaning they could be started or downloaded quickly using dial up connections of the early internet era. Internet speeds were much slower than today, so the file size was a limiting factor for many websites. Flash Player videos could run for a few minutes, feature multiple characters and sounds and still fit within 1-2 Megabytes of space. This allowed websites to stream high quality videos and users to share content amongst themselves on floppy disks or burnable CD-ROMs – technology that is almost out of use today.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s the popularity of Adobe’s player grew, and by 2009 Flash Player was installed on 99% of internet connected desktop computers.
Then we saw the rise of the smartphone era. Apple released their first iPhone in 2007 and Steve Jobs published an open letter “Thoughts on Flash” in 2010 in which he explained the reasons iPhones will not support that software. Flash Player was slow to adapt to the rise of popularity of smartphones. There was a host of security issues as well as compatibility problems.
Technologies such as HTML5, WebGL and greater internet speeds also led to dwindling support for the format. Leading websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Netflix were able to stream high quality video to smartphones without the use of Flash.
Adobe in 2017 revealed their decision to stop the development and support for Flash in 2020. That decision came via collaboration with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Mozilla. Adobe encouraged developers to move their Flash developed content to other formats.
Internet users have raised the question of what will become of all of the animations and games that were made in Flash when the format gets officially blocked on January 12. Certain developers such as Zynga have already made announcements, as they have recently revealed they will be shutting down FarmVille – one of the most popular Facebook games.
Places such as the Internet Archive website have a massive collection of Flash games and animations, and will continue to host them, even without the need for a Flash Player plugin.