Adobe Flash

~ what it was ~

Macromedia Flash (later Adobe Flash, after the 2005 buyout) shipped its first version in 1996 as FutureSplash Animator and ended its life on December 31, 2020, when Adobe officially withdrew support and all major browsers removed the plugin.

For roughly twenty-four years, Flash was the most important software in the consumer internet that was not a browser. It powered: animation websites, browser games, music players (Pandora, early YouTube), video players (the 2005-2015 web video stack), banner advertising, splash intros, interactive infographics, and a generation of weird auteur projects that have no replacement.

~ by the numbers ~

~ what flash actually was ~

Flash was three things at once. First, it was an authoring tool: a desktop application (originally Macromedia Director, then Flash MX, then Flash CS, then Adobe Animate) where designers and animators could draw, animate, script, and publish. Second, it was a file format: the SWF (Small Web Format), a compact binary container for vector animation, raster images, audio, and ActionScript code. Third, it was a runtime: a browser plugin that played SWFs.

The genius of Flash was that it was the easiest way for a non-programmer to build something interactive on the web. ActionScript started as a simple extension of JavaScript and grew into a full object-oriented language. A teenager could open Flash, draw a stick figure, animate it, and publish a game in an afternoon. The barrier to entry was much lower than HTML/CSS/JS for the same era's tooling.

~ what flash made ~

The cultural artefacts of Flash are too many to list, but a few representative examples:

• Newgrounds (1995-, Flash hub) and Albino Blacksheep: the home of independent Flash animation. Salad Fingers, the End of the World, Charlie the Unicorn, Badger Badger Badger, Llama Song, the Numa Numa video frame, these were Flash.
• Homestar Runner (2000-2010): an entire weekly comedy show built in Flash by two brothers in Atlanta. Strong Bad Email shaped a generation's sense of humour.
• Miniclip / AddictingGames / Kongregate: thousands of free browser games. Bloons, Line Rider, Bow Master, Stick War, Dad ‘n Me. An entire civilisation of bored office workers spent a decade here.
• Early YouTube. YouTube's video player was a Flash applet from 2005 to 2015. The phrase "YouTube buffering" in your memory is the SWF player loading.
• The intro page era of corporate web design (1999-2008): "click to enter," ambient music, animated logo, mouse-following starfield. Some of these have been lost forever; Flashpoint Project preserves what it can.

~ the end ~

Flash's death was personally orchestrated by Steve Jobs. In April 2010, Jobs published an open letter, "Thoughts on Flash," explaining why Apple would not allow Flash on the iPhone or iPad. The letter cited security, performance, battery life, touch interface unsuitability, and the existence of HTML5 video. The cumulative effect was that, on the most important new computing platform of the decade, Flash was banned.

Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google could not move as decisively as Apple, but they did move. Browser-side Flash was deprecated through the 2010s. Click-to-play was added, which is why default-disable came. By 2017 Adobe had announced an end-of-life date of December 31, 2020.

On the EOL date, Adobe shipped a final update to Flash Player that included a "kill switch" preventing it from playing any new content. Existing Flash content on hard drives could still be played in legacy environments, but the plugin would no longer work in browsers.

~ the absence ~

The auteur web. Flash made it possible for one person to build a complete experience, visuals, audio, interactivity, and ship it. Modern web technology requires a team: designer, developer, devops. Flash collapsed that role into one creator. Whole genres (the interactive comic, the long-form Flash animation, the experimental music interface) have not returned.

The browser game. There are still browser games but the volume and weirdness of the Flash era are not coming back. HTML5 games are higher-fidelity but require more skill to build and host. The amateur weird-game culture of 2007 Newgrounds is dead.

The.swf as a portable artefact. A finished Flash project was a single file you could email someone. They opened it; it played. There is no equivalent in the modern web.

~ epitaphs ~

"i learned to program by writing actionscript at age 11 to make a flash game where my dog fought aliens. i now write rust at a paying job. one of those things is harder. it isn't the dog one."; e.b. 32

"the entirety of homestar runner is preserved in a museum-quality archive at homestarrunner.com. it can never be properly experienced again because the experience required surprise, dial-up loading times, and being twelve. nostalgia is a non-renewable resource.", k.s. 40

"i was a flash designer for fifteen years. when adobe announced the EOL i was asked by my employer to migrate everything to html5. it took eighteen months and cost more than the original work. nobody noticed the difference except me, who could see what we'd lost.", m.l. 47