The End of an Internet Era

This actually has nothing to do with the great cancelling.

Today, marks the official end of Flash.

As of today, adobe has begun blocking flash content on the web. Not long ago, adobe announced flash would be coming to an end after 30 years flash is done.

www.zdnet.com...

Adobe has started blocking Flash content for computer users across the world, now displaying a warning instead that advises them to uninstall Flash Player. 

After thriving throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and then limping through the 2010s in a post-iPad world, Adobe Flash and Flash Player is officially finished. Issuing its final Flash update in December, Adobe announced its intent to block Flash content from running from today, January 12, 2021. 

It's kind of a sad day. I spent a lot of time on places like newgrounds when I was young. Flash powered a huge part of the web in those days. To be fair, flash could be an awful experience, different plugin versions, questionable security, shockwave.....

But, the ease of the development tools meant that a lot of strange, unique, interesting and just cool content was created. There's not really anything like the flash authoring tools that exists today.

Setting up an html5 canvas has a decently higher barrier of entry compared to the old flash tools.

Anyway, just posted this as a little farewell to flash.

a reply to: dug88

RIP.

a reply to: dug88

Good Riddance.

Screw those flash viruses.

I'm going to miss flash. People don't realize that a lot of old information is going to be lost now.

I mean I guess it's possible to have a computer that still has a flash player, but getting your hands on old flash content is probably going to be a pain in the ass.

I spent a lot of time on Newgrounds too. I learned how to do flash animations and make flash games.

I hope someone archives all the flash animations and games.

Don’t get me wrong. I liked flash a lot and had many good times with flash....

But to me personally it turned into a virus download upload haven.

Goodbye FLASH!!! AAAAH!!! SAVIOUR OF THE UNIVERSE!!!

a reply to: AutomateThis1

My thought exactly. But then again my first buggy little game I played way too much was a miniature golf course with something like 200 different holes. It would randomly string 18 together for a game, sometimes getting the same hole twice in a game.

a reply to: dug88

I remember the movie:

Hmm let me check when the last time I used anything Flash related?

Hmm up there with how often I updated Java.

Okay so what has changed?

I've kept flash files to play privately, I'm still allowed to play those right?

Or is this a great canceling of sort?

I remember having to torrent certain flash games just to get the file, but I was young, probably could have ripped them myself.

I feel like flash games have become a console of it's own in a way.

Imagine never having the option to play a NES game or a dreamcast game.

originally posted by: dug88
This actually has nothing to do with the great cancelling.

Today, marks the official end of Flash.

As of today, adobe has begun blocking flash content on the web. Not long ago, adobe announced flash would be coming to an end after 30 years flash is done.

www.zdnet.com...

Adobe has started blocking Flash content for computer users across the world, now displaying a warning instead that advises them to uninstall Flash Player. 

After thriving throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and then limping through the 2010s in a post-iPad world, Adobe Flash and Flash Player is officially finished. Issuing its final Flash update in December, Adobe announced its intent to block Flash content from running from today, January 12, 2021. 

It's kind of a sad day. I spent a lot of time on places like newgrounds when I was young. Flash powered a huge part of the web in those days. To be fair, flash could be an awful experience, different plugin versions, questionable security, shockwave.....

But, the ease of the development tools meant that a lot of strange, unique, interesting and just cool content was created. There's not really anything like the flash authoring tools that exists today.

Setting up an html5 canvas has a decently higher barrier of entry compared to the old flash tools.

Anyway, just posted this as a little farewell to flash.

flash IDE got html5 export features years ago. no idea where it is now, i've switched from it to flex sdk long before flash started dying.

so as far as the authoring goes, it wasn't a problem. the thing is, flash was working consistently across different browsers, and with the kind of things possible with it (which were impressive back then), performance and compatibility mattered.

they've screwed up on several fronts even before html5 and webgl really catched up (and that's not counting all the problems inherent to content plugins in general). first, there were security issues, that were sometimes fixed with severe performance penalties (moving non-3D shaders to non-SIMD-accelerated code due to bug in JIT compiler). and second, before webassembly became a thing and when everyone was getting excited about asm.js, browsers were already butchering flash, chrome to be precise. ppapi version of flash player, running under nacl, goes through chrome's 3D stack - the same used for webgl. at least back then, there was a huge gap in performance between that and the original flash player, using direct3d directly. long story short, ppapi version of flash player was more or less 50% slower when it comes to 3D content. even if adobe would want to keep flash alive back then, increasing importance of mobile platforms and moving away from conventional browser plugins to heavily sandboxed ones guaranteed it won't be able to keep up performance-wise.