Flash is dead. Adobe to stop updating and distributing Flash Player by 2020

Today on their news page, Adobe announced that they are finally ending Flash player for good.

After years of security holes and waning support, the final nail in Flash Player's coffin was pounded in today.

When the web was much younger, before HTML5 was even a twinkle in someone's eye, Flash was at the top of it's game. It was used for games, small animations, videos, interfaces, and (less fun) ads.

For a while it was the best, sometimes only way to accomplish certain things on the web, like custom controls and web page functionality.

But times have changed.

Ever since Apple announced that Flash would not run on it's phones or iPads, the future of Flash on the web has been in doubt. And things just kept going downhill for the contentious plugin. Adobe abandoned plans for their Apple-compatable Flash player in 2015. The reports of serious security vulnerabilities kept pouring in. Flash builder now exports HTML5. Firefox blocked the plugin and Chrome disables Flash player by default.

The minigame and Flash video sites that kids from the early 2000's enjoyed faded out, and the things that replaced them - youtube for videos, mobile apps for the games were a bit more sterile, corporate and monolithic. Seeing this news made me look up Newgrounds again, and I was happy that it still exists, and delivers lots of non-Flash content as well.

In the future, I worry about these sites. Apps really ate their lunch, and we are all worse off for it. Microtransactions and corporate gatekeepers have replaced the hit-or-miss quality and offbeat charm of the old amature flash games.

Hopefully the creators or the sites themselves can migrate their content.

Flash Builder, the program that creates Flash is still used today to create animation, and there are even projects that allow it to be exported to mobile games. Adobe has not mentioned an end of life for the builder, but only the player.

Goodbye, Flash Player. Thanks for the memories, but it's past your time to go. We'll miss you, Homestar Runner