Topic: Flash in the Pan

[Blumf]

It's quarter century reign of terror is finally over!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55497353

Adobe Flash Player, the browser plug-in that brought rich animations and interactivity to the early web, has officially reached the end of its life.

Released in 1996, Flash was once one of the most popular ways for people to stream videos and play games online.

But it was plagued with security problems and failed to transition to the smartphone era.

Adobe will no longer offer security updates for Flash and has urged people to uninstall it.

...

"You could make a full three-minute animation with multiple characters, backgrounds, sounds and music less than 2 megabytes (MB) and viewable from within the browser," explained animator David Firth.

His surreal animations and characters - such as the gangly, green hunchback Salad Fingers - enjoyed viral success before the advent of social media.

Here's a HTML5 compatible version of the only useful Flash site: https://html5zombo.com/

[bgmnts]

Genuinely a bit gutted.

[JesusAndYourBush]

Genuinely a bit gutted.

I'm not.  When it started it seemed like a cool tool for making animations, and if all that's people ever did with it it'd have been cool... but people started using it for other things and it was a huge resource hog (possibly that reflects badly on the programmers and not flash itself).  I uninstalled it in 2014 and didn't miss it - sites that used it usually found another non-flash way of doing the same things, or if they didn't it meant I was missing some bells & whistles I didn't really need.

[the]

When it came in though, Flash was a revelation in terms of what you could do with web design. Being able to have changing layouts that segued into each other, vector imagery and intricate little interactive animations really outclassed the very limited abilities of plain HTML at the time (which the implementation of HTML5 only caught up with many years later).

The introduction of Flash video was basically responsible for the creation of Youtube and its ilk.

I imagine a lot of today's game developers cut their teeth making Flash games too. (I did attempt a thread about Flash game nostalgia a while back.)

So yeah, not needed anymore, but it definitely broke down a lot of boundaries for what you can do with websites.