Farewell Flash, Adobe's Media Runtime Reaches End of Life on NYD 2021

Flash Logo

 

 

Flash, the Adobe Media runtime which was acquired from Macromedia reaches the end of it's lifetime on Friday, January 1st 2021 by which time browsers will no longer allow the technology to run and Adobe will stop supplying the software.

Indeed, Microsoft has been prompting Windows users with a dialog box to uninstall the software. At one point in time, it seemed the whole world was powered by the technology. It went from a necessity for viewing web content to 'you'll probably still need it for a couple of sites' to just a frustration when you visit that one site still clinging on you visit every few years.

NewGrounds Logo

 

From Newgrounds to Youtube, it seemed every website used Flash, and it would often be the choice for companies providing an online television or radio experience to supply protected streams only decodeable to the device first received on through DRM (Digital Rights Management) framework. Real Player was also used on the BBC, and later for a short while Microsoft's Silverlight would be the choice for Netflix, and Apple's Quicktime would power large chunks of the web, including it's own trailers page.

Badgers, from TheWeebl

 

Flash games and interactive movies were a huge staple of the early-to-mid 2000s, and most teens of that era will have spent a decent amount of time using it in one way or another. The Flash browser plugin was a frequent source of frustration as it would often cause browser hangs and crashes. Coming to the end of 2020 and 2021, plugins are few and far between as web standards are agreed, the technologies become baked into the browser, so that for the main part no single browser is left behind, providing it adheres to the agreed standards.The reason for the death of plugins is, in part, down to security; Sophos' Naked Security Chet Chat podcast hosts Chester Wisniewski and Paul Ducklin would report the various discovered vulnerabilities along with those in Windows reminding you to 'patch early, patch often'. 

Meat Boy

Such was the influence of Flash that some games would even end up in some form or another getting full-scale console releases - from the Meat Boy game would come Super Meat Boy, Alien Hominid would also make the transition.

For those who are concerned about a whole chunk of content simply disappearing over night, fear not! A number of projects are underway to preserve what may otherwise be lost forever. The Internet Archive is hosting a significant amount of content, and SuperPiter has at the time of writing this post, a 60MB archive of games and a 14MB player to play them on. Newgrounds also has built in players or downloadable players. Alas, some will slip through the cracks, but a massive amount will be preserved for future generations to see what came before.

Click-to-Play stopped annoying autoplaying media

 

Whilst Adobe will stop supplying the player plugin and the browsers will no longer support Flash in it's existing form, it appears there will always be ways to play those games or movies you remember, from Stick Death to Badgers, meaning Flash will never ever truly die. And yes, you can play Doom on it, no, it won't run Crysis. Adieu, Flash. Thanks for the memories.