-
Owner Adobe, has announced phasing out by 2020
Adobe, owners of Flash, a favourite platform for Web designers to create rich animation and graphics, have decided it should die. In a blog posted on its website last week, the company announced : "We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats."
Since 2000, Adobe Flash has used for the production of animations, rich Internet applications, desktop applications, mobile applications, mobile games and embedded web browser video players. Flash displays text and graphics to provide animation, video games and applications. It allows streaming of audio and video, and can capture mouse, keyboard, microphone and camera input.
Artists have been producing Flash animations using tools like Adobe Animate and video games using Adobe Flash Builder. The rest of us downloaded the free Flash player to view such content on Web browsers or the AIR app to see it on mobiles.
But for some years now, developers have slowly moved to other platforms to create animation and graphics—like HTML5 or WebGL which unlike Flash were based on non-propietary, Open standards. The push was also driven by the perception that Flash was not too secure, being a favourite target of hackers—and was too much of a drain on a device's resources. HTML5 was lighter and safer.
Apple, in a sense, gave Flash the kiss of death, when it took the Flash Player out of the iPhone in 2010.
The Adobe blog also says: "We remain fully committed to working with partners, including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla to maintain the security and compatibility of Flash content." This means all these companies work to end Flash based content by 2020. Google, Microsoft Edge and Firefox have already stopped running Flash content. Only Internet Explorer still uses the Flash plug in—but will stop by 2018.
Among developers, there is still some nostalgia for the graphics and animation tool whose 'use by' date is nearing.
Speaking to Reuters, Govind Balakrishnan, Vice President of product development for Adobe Creative Cloud said: "Few technologies have had such a profound and positive impact in the internet era." But for most of users, it hardly matters how that video game or that animation is created. We only ask that it be great to see or play.