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The New Year Begins With The Demise Of Adobe’s Flash Player

For the millennials, Adobe’s Flash Player used to be an important part of their lives. There was a time some 15-20 years ago when the internet world was not full of memes and gifs. And it would all have remained dull and useless if Adobe’s Flash Plug-in was not there.

Launched in 1996, this browser plug-in brought rich animations and allowed the users to enjoy games and a lot of web interactivity.

More Than Just Animations

When YouTube was launched and was not as popular as it is today, people would not have been able to stream high-quality YouTube videos on their personal computers if the Flash browser plug-in was not there. Especially in the 1990s, Flash did bring a huge difference in the developing gaming and video industries.

Flash had a lot of shortcomings too.

In 2010, Steve Jobs had pointed out in detail the various areas where Flash had problems. The thing is that Adobe created Flash in the pre-smartphone era, and it was originally meant to be used with a PC and a mouse. Despite Adobe’s attempts, the company could not really push it beyond that towards mobile devices and applications as such. When the smartphone era began, the web standards changed, the mobile devices became low-powered, and when touch interfaces came, Flash became a long-gone case.

Companies still tried to resist this change.

There are many companies, banks, contractors, etc. that still use Flash for different internal purposes like training and management software, and when Adobe announced in 2020 that this move is coming up, they tried to resist it with all their might. For their help, another web software company called Leaning Technologies developed an app that allows the users to use Flash content on their modern browsers.

Not All is Gone

An open-source program called Ruffle translates Flash files for the modern-era browsers, and some people are making efforts to use this program and retain a couple of Flash files in the Internet Archive library.

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