RIP Adobe Flash, you changed the internet forever but you will not be missed

[TetraSky]

How do I even uninstall it.

Spoiler

 

It's there, in my control panel, but it's nowhere in the "Programs and features" for me to uninstall it. Heck, I don't even know how the F it installed itself in the first place. I sure never installed it after my last format last November. I tried using some uninstaller tools, and it wasn't in there either.

[Master Disaster]

4 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

How do I even uninstall it.

  Hide contents

 

 

It's there, in my control panel, but it's nowhere in the "Programs and features" for me to uninstall it. Heck, I don't even know how the F it installed itself in the first place. I sure never installed it after my last format last November. I tried using some uninstaller tools, and it wasn't in there either.

Yeah, MS bundle it with Windows 10. This will change very soon though, they will be disabling & removing it from Windows this month.

[Moonzy]

Are there any ways to run flash games that I have after this update? Something like an emulator or converter?

[Master Disaster]

3 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

Are there any ways to run flash games that I have after this update? Something like an emulator or converter?

The Internet Archive have a working Emulator and are currently on a mass preservation drive for Flash content. You can upload to Archive.org, help them out and view your content.

[Nayr438]

9 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

Are there any ways to run flash games that I have after this update? Something like an emulator or converter?

You can take a look at Ruffle, which is a flash emulator of sorts.

[Murasaki]

good times

 

[CephDigital]

And with this, my childhood is now dead and buried.

[Commodus]

Flash was great early on, but it was arguably in trouble a long, long time ago.

 

Remember 2010, when people were blasting Apple for sticking to HTML5 on the web because it saw Flash as a proprietary format with performance and security issues? And how Google, BlackBerry and other companies eagerly chained themselves to Flash because it was supposedly vital to the internet?

 

Oh, that was a slow motion train wreck. BlackBerry effectively built the PlayBook tablet around "but it runs Flash" and... well, we know how that turned out. Google, meanwhile, spent years backpedaling from that mistake and got to the point where it was actively blocking Flash by 2016. Hell, Adobe itself ditched mobile Flash in 2011. You could practically hear Apple's "I told you so" as the industry went from worshipping Flash to recoiling in horror.

 

To be clear, HTML5 had to grow to become as strong a Flash replacement as it is now, and it's easier to embrace the standard with newer hardware. But I'd say that Flash was already past its prime by 2010 and that it should've been on its way out sooner.

[Master Disaster]

1 hour ago, Commodus said:

Flash was great early on, but it was arguably in trouble a long, long time ago.

 

Remember 2010, when people were blasting Apple for sticking to HTML5 on the web because it saw Flash as a proprietary format with performance and security issues? And how Google, BlackBerry and other companies eagerly chained themselves to Flash because it was supposedly vital to the internet?

 

Oh, that was a slow motion train wreck. BlackBerry effectively built the PlayBook tablet around "but it runs Flash" and... well, we know how that turned out. Google, meanwhile, spent years backpedaling from that mistake and got to the point where it was actively blocking Flash by 2016. Hell, Adobe itself ditched mobile Flash in 2011. You could practically hear Apple's "I told you so" as the industry went from worshipping Flash to recoiling in horror.

 

To be clear, HTML5 had to grow to become as strong a Flash replacement as it is now, and it's easier to embrace the standard with newer hardware. But I'd say that Flash was already past its prime by 2010 and that it should've been on its way out sooner.

You missed the best point out of this anecdote. in 2015 Adobe straight up told everyone to stop using Flash entirely. Even Adobe knew it was a trainwreck and I think by 2010 they really couldn't be bothered to maintain it and iterate on it any more so as the web changed around it, it just sat there stagnating.

 

Edit - Thinking about it, the fact it took so long to disappear entirely is a great testament to just how essential it was to the early days of the multimedia internet. By 2010 pretty much everyone was over it, in 2015 its creator abandoned it and it still took 5 years to reach the point where you don't need it any more.

[givingtnt]

Such a love-hate relationship for me..

 

So many good childhood memories, some fun starts with learning programming, and even recently in college !

 

But man, I do absolutely hate animating in it it's horrendous imo.

 

Even recently though, some bigger online games that were using flash were shutdown and honestly I'm going to miss them. Hordes (or die2nite for the Americans) will always remain one of my favorite online cooperative strategy game ever.

 

And remember when websites were made with Flash !?

 

Man.. the loading screen was annoying but the animations..

 

Goodbye

 

 

 

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, givingtnt said:

Such a love-hate relationship for me..

 

So many good childhood memories, some fun starts with learning programming, and even recently in college !

 

But man, I do absolutely hate animating in it it's horrendous imo.

 

Even recently though, some bigger online games that were using flash were shutdown and honestly I'm going to miss them. Hordes (or die2nite for the Americans) will always remain one of my favorite online cooperative strategy game ever.

 

And remember when websites were made with Flash !?

 

Man.. the loading screen was annoying but the animations..

 

Goodbye

 

 

 

Farmville was closed down on Dec 30th of last year because it was built in Flash and that game was massive.

[n0stalghia]

It will be missed for sure. Hundreds of hours of fun in Flash games.

[DildorTheDecent]

F for the Flash games.

[X-System]

43 minutes ago, DildorTheDecent said:

F for the Flash games.

But you can to run old Windows in virtual machine for to play Flash games

 

And I have a few little games SWF (Yeti kicks penguin and girl on bike kicks boy, for to get longest distance ) that works in Windows Media Classic

[thechinchinsong]

As a person that never personally had to deal with any of the negatives of Flash with its security problems and other myriad of issues, I can only say I remember it fondly. From what it looks like though, HTML5 is indeed a worthy successor and so its not like there won't be a replacement for the creativity and fun things that Flash enabled people to make. Its nice that there are a variety of projects and methods to preserve and emulate flash content so that at least a portion of the internet that was can be archived.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

remember how shit HTML version of youtube was back then? 

[pythonmegapixel]

25 minutes ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

remember how shit HTML version of youtube was back then? 

It's still, even in 2021, inexplicably missing some features - most notably the ability to force the video to buffer all the way through, thereby preventing it from pausing part way through to buffer. This was a significant boost in the experience on lower-end systems or slower connections

[Dabombinable]

I'm fine with things. I can still play all of my favourite flash games:

[Master Disaster]

32 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

It's still, even in 2021, inexplicably missing some features - most notably the ability to force the video to buffer all the way through, thereby preventing it from pausing part way through to buffer. This was a significant boost in the experience on lower-end systems or slower connections

That's more than likely done deliberately to try and prevent downloaders from being able to grab full videos.

[sub68]

flash still works on my machine

[A3on.]

12 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Yesterday was December 31st 2020, it was the end of a terrible year and also the end of what became a terrible piece of software. It was Adobes official end of life date for Flash Player.

 

As of yesterday Adobe recommends that anyone with Adobe Flash installed on their devices should remove it, most browsers already block flash content and Microsoft will be removing it from Windows PCs (likely on the next patch Tuesday). From January 12th 2021 Flash Player will stop playing Flash animations entirely and the final remnants of the first iteration of a multimedia internet will die forever.

Flash's death started in 2015 when Adobe recommended all web developers start using HTML5. Its taken 5 years but now its officially dead.

Of course there's now a huge push to archive as much flash content as possible before it dies permanently.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/31/22208190/adobe-flash-is-dead

 

Flash really did change the face of the internet. I remember the early days of the modern internet, we got our first family PC in the early 90s with dial up and 3 months free Compuserve. I remember surfing for hours, endless walls of green comic sans text on black backgrounds, larger images had to be physically downloaded to be viewed, every page had a visitor counter on it.

 

I was actually the perfect age for Flash, by the time I hit my late teens/twenties it was everywhere. Ebaums world was my favourite place, my mates and I would spend hours watching satire and nonsense.

RIP Flash

[GoodBytes]

12 hours ago, Ashley said:

why does everyone hate Flash so much? i never had a security issue with it before... 

So, I used to be a ex-Flash software developer.

 

Here is why Flash was hated by everyone:

• Macromedia was taking real good care of Flash. I even recall light talks on considering to make it open source (so that it is integrated in web browsers, and be something like JavaScript). Of course, this never happened. This was probably due to being a big revenue for the company. And it didn't even cross the mind of the dev community really. Open-Source concept was all new to most people and seen as unproven in a way.
  
  Then in 2005, Adobe bought Macromedia... sadly, Adobe didn't care about Flash... they bought the company for its other solutions such as: ColdFusion, Fireworks, and its various IP which they imported in their own software suites.
  
  Soon after Adobe bought Flash, they rushed released a new version to replace Macromedia with Adobe branding, where this version was clearly in beta stages (so buggy, you could not put text in bold. Bug was never fixed... until the next version, which you had to pay hundreds to get).
   
• Macromedia was doing huge steps forwards in Flash development at each release. Since under the hands of Adobe, development was going at snail paste and lack luster. Worst, it also commanded Adobe pricing, making it super expensive for what you were getting, and featured Adobe quality which we all know and love. 
   
• Flash was too easy to develop. Flash was so easy to develop, that anyone could pick up and get started... included ad agency which didn't know anything on good coding, nor knew the strength and weaknesses of the platform... this led to VERY poorly optimized software. So, you had the following common issues:
  • Animated ads were the new thing, and no ad agency (or very few) knew how to make proper ads. They didn't know what works and doesn't. All done on the cheap, without any R&D. So, you had flash ads with 3sec music that auto-plays and loops nonstop, audio of people talking that auto plays at full blast in shit audio quality, terrible animations... everything to ruine one's web site and user experience.
  • Flash was vector-based graphics and CPU rendered. You know what CPUs hates the most? Doing vector graphics. That is why we have GPUs! GPUs love doing vectors. So, while you could do many things in Flash to pass things the GPU or reduce CPU load... it required knowledge, which most, if not all, ad makers and many developers of Flash didn't know. This ended up with shit experience to users. And if you are on a laptop, your system fan would be ramping up like crazy due to the CPU load, and your battery life being killed. Basically, you were surfing the web, but it was like you are playing a demanding game.
    
    In fact, this is one of the reasons why ad-blockers were made in the first place. It was to kill that shit off. And this is when Google stepped in, with its new ad model, which was ads that didn't use Flash, had no animations and no images. It was text only. Google proved that you could make effective ads. But companies insisted in graphics, so we have what we have today.
     
  • Full Flash websites. Some site where made like that. Why make a site using HTML/CSS/JS which are quick to fetch with the slow connections at the time, and easily cached, powered by powerful and super well optimized rendering engine, when you can scrap all that and use Flash, and make them wait ages with their 1-5Mbps connection because the maker decided to have this annoying, full blasted music with its annoying animations. And the cheery on the top, as it was all wonderfully made, back/forward navigation support wasn't supported. You hit back, you lost everything, you are out of the site... you had to go back, and re-download the whole things. I did encounter sites that forces you to see a "Welcome" video before you could navigate on the site. So, you had to watch that again.
    
    I have already decompiled (easy to do) a Flash based ad, and the ad maker used a for-loop inside another for-loop, inside another for-loop, when it could have easily been done with a single for-loop.  This is the coding quality you see. No regards in anything. If you have no idea what I just said, think that this kind of coding... art.... is what gets you fired from a software developer jobs. This is how bad it is.
     
• Because Adobe effectively killed Flash (all devs knew) since they bought them, Adobe never worked on optimization, never worked on making it fully GPU rendered. And smartphone was a thing by now, and the lack of GPU rendered, made it that phone CPUs could not handle Flash... or at least the "quality" work made by ads and many web "developers" at the time.
  
  Basically, Apple refusal to have Flash, "due to security concerns" was just Steve Jobs being polite to Adobe. I haven't seen Flash on any smartphone. All we got was Flash Lite, which was garbage. Basically, video playback support and that was about it... Apple knew that under Adobe hands it won't go anywhere, and just pushed HTML5. As all web devs knew that Flash was dead since Adobe got them, the push on HTML5 and JS as a solution to replace Flash was in prime focused. A few years later, we had just that, and it quickly replaced Flash. WebGL of course took care of games and any advance animations and introduced 3D graphics ('cause why not... we are now using the GPUs).
   
• Security issues, backed with Adobe world-renowned speed and quality work in fixing them.

 

So, in the end, while Flash revolutionized the Internet in huge ways, it was quickly hated by not only its users, but also security experts and even its very own developers. And I guess, the way Flash was treated by Adobe, you can say that even Adobe hated Flash. Everyone hated it.

 

[Salv8 (sam)]

all rise for the death of a legend

(play this while rising and salute because flash deserves it.)

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

That's more than likely done deliberately to try and prevent downloaders from being able to grab full videos.

not like that's stopping ppl from doing just that 5 years later

[GoodBytes]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

That's more than likely done deliberately to try and prevent downloaders from being able to grab full videos.

No. It was done to reduce datacenter/service load. Why should it stream a video to a person that isn't watching?