why adobe flash is no longer being used? For that matter what does it even do ??
In: Technology
Flash was a rich media plugin for the early days of the internet when browser technologies and standards were far, far more primitive than they are now. In that era, browsers were generally only good for reading text, following links, and executing extremely simple javascript instructions or server calls. To watch a video, you had to actually download the file and play it back locally on your machine with your local player. Interactive content did exist, but was incredibly obtuse to build and maintain using the HTML and JS of the era, with very limited graphics rendering capability or dynamic content.
The principal thing Flash did, other than be one of the first easy-to-use in-browser video stream plugins, was make it easy to build interactive content and animations. Timeline animations and Actionscript were simple to use, easy to pick up by kids, and resulted in a huge boom of content on the internet, at a time where the only content your average person could ‘add’ to the internet would be a forum post on a BBS. Now you had a raft of games, videos, animations, voicework, just this huge flourishing of amateur content built by people for other people.
As internet standards caught up, Flash became obsolete as a way to develop rich media, as it was slow and proprietary. After a point there was nothing Flash could do that you couldn’t do yourself with a bit of work in JS, and its ubiquity resulted in it being targetted constantly for attack by hackers. There was an era where the easiest way to compromise a machine was to feed it a fake Flash plugin update and get the user to update, or sneak a malicious flash microapp into an ad delivery network that would auto-load on a user’s machine and compromise it. The final nail was when Steve Jobs refused to implement flash support in the iPhone.
It was never more than an intermediate stepping stone technology that helped bootstrap browsers into the multimedia delivery apps they are now, and for the time it did it’s job well.
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