On December 31, 2020, the American company Adobe definitively discontinued Flash Player, the famous program that for decades has allowed you to see animations and multimedia content online. From December 31st it is no longer possible to download the program and in the following days, starting from January 12th, Adobe will block the possibility of viewing the Flash contents. The various browsers for surfing the internet, such as Chrome, Safari and Firefox, will stop supporting Flash in the next few days; some have already done so.
Flash is a very old program, by internet standards: an early precursor, called FutureWave, was first published in 1993. It was bought by the Macromedia company in 1996, which renamed it Macromedia Flash, and finally, in 2005, was acquired by Adobe. Flash allowed the creation of animations and multimedia contents, but its most famous element was certainly Flash Player, that is the program that allowed users to see and use the contents: between the end of the nineties and the beginning of the 2000s, Flash Player it was installed on most computers connected to the internet.
In some ways it had to be: the languages that existed then to create web pages, mainly HTML and Javascript, were still quite rudimentary and allowed for few graphic embellishments. Therefore, if you wanted to show a video on your web page, you needed Flash, as well as if you wanted to add multimedia elements and other ornaments. Until a little over ten years ago, virtually all web pages with creative and interesting graphics (and often tacky, the internet of the past decades did not stand out for elegance) used Flash, which was so important that some systems operational were distributed with Flash Player already integrated. In short: a consistent part of the aesthetics of the internet between the nineties and the early 2000s is thanks to Flash.
Moreover, since Flash was enormously widespread and low-cost, for decades it was used by many programmers or simply curious who wanted to experiment new things on the internet in terms of graphics, animation, multimedia. One of the best known aspects of using Flash was video games, which were easy to create (although some Flash games were very complex) and therefore allowed great creative freedom. They were also easily accessible for users: most Flash games were free and ran in a browser, with no need for a console or special software, which contributed to the popularity of gaming platforms like Kongregate or Miniclip.
Flash has also long been used for animation, educational and art projects, and even some feature films. For example, The Secret of Kells, an Oscar-nominated 2009 animated film (lost to Pixar's Up) is animated partially in Flash.
But Flash also had gigantic problems: the two best known are safety and performance. Regarding security: Flash Player was so full of vulnerabilities, i.e. problems in the code that could be exploited by potential hackers for cyber attacks, that security experts have advised against installing it for years, even when it was practically essential to surf the internet. . Some of these vulnerabilities were of the worst type, called “zero-day”, that is, those that remain unknown until they are used for malicious attacks, and therefore do not allow time (“zero-day”, in fact) to find countermeasures.
These flaws have also been used in very famous hacker attacks in the past years, and some were also found (and kept hidden for exploitation) by Hacking Team, the controversial Italian cybersecurity company that was itself hacked in 2015.
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The other big problem is performance: Flash was a pretty heavy program, and websites that used Flash animations or graphics took a long time to load. Additionally, using Flash made computers generally slower, and helped drain laptop batteries quickly.
Aside from cybersecurity experts, the first to publicly and harshly challenge Flash was Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple, who in 2008, when he sold the first iPhone with its iOS operating system, made a choice that was considered radical: do not allow the installation of Flash or the execution of Flash content on Apple portable devices, including iPads, which would be released a couple of years later (on Mac computers, on the other hand, it was possible to install and use Flash).
Jobs's choice was very contested, to the point that he, in 2010, published a long open letter entitled “Thoughts on Flash”, in which he described the numerous problems: among them safety and performance (according to Jobs, the animations in Flash would have drained the battery of an iPhone twice as fast as other formats), but also the fact that Flash was a closed and proprietary system, which gave Adobe complete control of the contents (control that Apple wanted to keep for itself) .
Jobs could afford to exclude Flash from iPhones because at that time alternative languages were already widespread or were about to be made available that had begun to do the same things as Flash, in some cases better, such as HTML5. Major video streaming sites, such as YouTube and Netflix, which were then in their infancy, had already abandoned Flash for other better systems. Social networks like Facebook had also begun to abandon Flash.
According to experts, Apple's decision to exclude Flash from iOS was central to the decline of Adobe's program, which has become less widespread and less important. Flash alternatives in graphics and video games, such as WebGL and Unity (in addition to the aforementioned HTML5) have become increasingly efficient.
Adobe has been phasing out Flash for many years now: already in 2012 it had completely given up using it on portable devices, not only those of Apple but also on Android. The announcement that Flash Player would be discontinued at the end of 2020 also came from a few years ago: Adobe gave it in 2017, acknowledging that alternative systems had now made Flash obsolete.
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As we said, most browsers are about to eliminate Flash or have already done so: Chrome and other browsers based on the same system, such as Microsoft Edge and Brave, should eliminate support in the course of January, and for some time the they had disabled by default. Firefox released the latest update that still supports Flash on December 15th. The latest version of Safari, released in November, has already stopped offering the ability to view Flash content.
Microsoft has started rolling out an update for the Windows operating system that is supposed to eliminate Flash Player from PCs, and on some systems Adobe itself is sending out warnings to remind you to uninstall everything. Mac owners are likely not to have Flash Player, because Apple has stopped selling Macs with the program already installed for more than ten years. But if you have a Mac and have installed Flash Player at some point, it is now advisable to uninstall it, both because it is no longer needed (although some companies will continue to use it) and for security reasons.
The large amount of Flash content produced in recent decades is in danger of disappearing, and in part it has already done so, because practically all websites have updated and abandoned the old animations and the old graphics. However, some projects have started to safeguard at least some Flash games. The Kongregate platform, for example, in March struck an agreement with a museum in Rochester, in the United States, to preserve its catalog.
The Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that aims to preserve the culture of the internet, began saving hundreds of animations and Flash video games on its platform a few months ago. The latter are also playable, thanks to an emulation system that does not make it necessary to have Flash Player installed. According to the Internet Archive, the problem of discontinuing Flash is not so much Flash itself as the risk of losing the vast amount of art and creativity it contained.
