why adobe flash is no longer being used? For that matter what does it even do ??
In: Technology
To really understand flash, you’ve got to understand what the internet was like before flash.
Up until the late 90s, web pages consisted of formatted text, images, links and external content. That’s not to say that web pages couldn’t have audio, or video or interactivity or dynamic content or whatever. They could and did. But it was all achieved with external content. That is content that was downloaded by the browser but then handed off to a plugin of some sort to actually process the data and display it to the user.
Setting up a browser in the late 90s was a mission. You’d start with both IE and Netscape. You’d need both because scripting worked differently on each browser and thus an interactive webpage built for one browser wouldn’t work on the other browser without being ported – something many web page builders never got around to doing.
Speaking of scripting, you would probably want to install a couple of extra scripting engines because web page builders could use any scripting language they liked, but neither browser supported all the common scripting language out of the box.
Then, you’d want to install a runtime environment (such as JRE) to handle applets. Applets were perhaps **the** way to handle graphics heavy interactive components in your webpage before flash.
Then you’d want at least four different media plugins – quicktime, real, windows media and something to handle MPEG formats. Because each plugin only played its own formats and of course, web page builders each had their own preferences..
Then, you’d want to get a bunch of codecs for each of your plugins. Because not only could web builders choose any container they liked for audio/video, they could encode the contained media with whatever codec they chose. Chances are that every new webpage you went to would have the audio / video in a container/codec combination you’d never encountered before so it would take half an hour of messing around to get the page to display correctly.
There were other common plugins you’d need to, like the acrobat reader plugin (pdf was just starting to hit the mainstream), shockwave plugin (released in 1995) and so on.
And after all that, every third website wouldn’t work because it required some exotic plugin or codec or whatever. Trying to view interactive web content in the late 90s S U C K E D.
Then, along came flash. It had actually been around for a few years already, but suddenly around 2000/2001 all the web pages were flash pages. No longer did you need to install multiple browsers and for each, several plugins and dozens of codecs. You just installed one browser and one plugin (flash) and boom! your computer could display every website, everywhere, everytime. It just worked. You can see the attraction.
At it’s peak, flash was installed on something like 92% of all computers. Something like 99% of all web connected computers had flash running. It was too tempting of a honeypot. If you could find a security vulnerability in flash, you could break into any computer, regardless of the operating system. Unfortunately this is what happens when a single piece of software captures a huge marketshare. And it’s always an expensive nightmare to fix. Similar thing happened to windows when it first grabbed a huge share of the OS market and it took Microsoft probably 5 versions over 15 years (and heaps of money) to fully get on top of the security issue.
Then came HTML5 that built a lot of the plugins into the browser. This has reintroduced the problem of unsupported codecs, which makes the step from flash to HTML5 a backward step in some respects. But the codec ecosystem is much more dominated by a few players (webm and mp4 h264) these days, so it’s less of a problem than it was in the 90s.
With alternatives that were kinda better and kinda not much worse, and a product that was still years away from fixing its security issues, developers started to move away from flash. And as they did, the pots of money that could be made from selling developer tools dried up. And as it did, so did Adobe’s enthusiasm for the product.
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