With 2020 in the rearview mirror, most people will need to visit a digital museum to relive designs like Homestar Runner and Peanut Butter Jelly Time or their first favorite web-based defense games.
Adobe Flash, the web application behind a series of brilliant animations and games in the 90s and 90s, finally kicks the bucket officially in 2021. Adobe will stop updating and fixing the Flash Player on Thursday and start to block it January 12 block it from almost all versions of Windows at the beginning of the new year, and major browsers such as Chrome and Firefox will block Flash extensions, joining Safari, which has already does.
It is the long-awaited end of technology from an earlier Internet era, a relic of when there were fewer standards in the industry for audio and video formatting, making Flash a convenient way for people with different computers and browsers to view the same content. For several years, before memes became a domestic concept, Flash designs and games were a dominant form of Internet culture.
But it was full of bugs and prone to being hacked, especially since the latest versions tried to keep up with the evolution of Internet file sizes and speeds, and browsers could handle better applications, said Tarah Wheeler, cyber security researcher at Belfer Center for Science and Harvard University International Affairs.
“It was a guaranteed way to play these very large files (remember when it took a long time to download media files and you got MAD when they didn’t play?),” Said Wheeler in a text message.
“However, this guarantee that the audio and video files would be played on a system with Flash meant that sometimes your guests would be tracking mud through the door and on their clean carpets,” she said.
Some projects aim to preserve existing Flash content after its end date. An open source program called Ruffle translates specific Flash files to be read by modern browsers.
The Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library, has an ongoing project to use Ruffle to preserve the most influential games and videos that thrived during the Flash’s heyday, said its software curator Jason Scott.
“There is a whole small layer of this culture and it was buried in 2006,” when video streaming started to become more common, he said.
“In the archive, we load a few thousand flash animations, games and programs, with the only disadvantage that I have to check them manually,” said Scott. ‘”Whenever I can, I tried to put them in the file, to go,’ please don’t worry: we have 200 episodes of Strongbad’s emails'”.
Much of the use of Flash in recent years has been made by the home industry of sites like Kongregate, Armor Games and Addicting Games, which produce simple and brilliant browser games. They had to eliminate Flash in favor of games written in more contemporary languages.
“It’s a little bit bitter, because when it comes to Flash and the impact it had on the creative community, it was probably the most impactful set of tools for the independent developer that ever existed,” Bill Karamouzis, CEO of Addicting Games, said.
“In recent years, security was a legitimate concern and performance concern, but in the beginning Flash really allowed a lot of people to be creative on the web,” he said.
“The game library is probably the largest collection of game titles ever created. Many of them are of questionable quality, but there is no doubt about the actual number, ”said Karamouzis.
The end date of Flash is not a surprise to developers: it has been set since 2017. But several companies around the world that use it for various internal purposes, such as employee training or management software, are suddenly fighting for a solution, said Stefano De Rossi, CEO of Leaning Technologies, a web software development company that last year started selling an app that makes Flash content on a web page look normal.
“We are contacted by banks a week before the deadline, major defense contractors, all types of companies. It is really remarkable, ”he said.
These companies tend to resist the urge to rebuild their internal Flash programs from scratch, said De Rossi.
“You can see companies resisting this change and perhaps hoping that, over time, some kind of extension will be announced,” he said. “I’ve heard several say, ‘for sure, with Covid, this will be postponed'”.