why adobe flash is no longer being used? For that matter what does it even do ??
In: Technology
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TLDR: Flash is full of security holes and there are better ways to do what Flash does these days.
Flash was invented in 1996 during an earlier era of the internet when browsers were much more limited.
Adobe Flash allowed for video playback, interactive components of websites, and flash based animations that were revolutionary at the time.
Flash resulted in a renaissance of sorts with flash based video games (newgrounds.com) and flash cartoons (Homestar Runner) becoming popular ways to waste time just as the internet was becoming common place.
So why are we killing it?
Because Flash is a dinosaur. The flash plugin is full of security holes and despite Adobe’s hard work over the past few years to patch it the industry has moved on.
Newer technologies like HTML5 have taken it’ place and are honestly better at doing what Flash used to do.
Continuing to use flash on your website today merely puts your website and your users at risk.
Adobe meanwhile is happy to be rid of it because they have been effectively handing it out for free for years now. They made their money selling tools that made flash based websites and games, but that well has long since dried up so to them spending money to patch an obsolete protocol is nothing more than an unnecessary cost. So they have willingly killed off their own product.
Basically we don’t need it anymore and keeping it around is causing more problems than it’s worth.
The flash player, years ago, was primarily used to enable rich web content, such as video playback, to be placed into web pages when it couldn’t be done using web standards at the time. It also found use for online web browser games.
Many of its uses, such as video playback, were later supplemented by modern web standards (such as HTML5 and it’s video element).
As it has fallen out of common use and is prone to security flaws, adobe has decided its no longer worth maintaining.
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