With 2020 in the rearview mirror, most people will have to visit a digital museum to relive cartoons like Homestar Runner and Peanut Butter Jelly Time or their favorite early web-based tower defense games.
Adobe Flash, the web application behind a series of bright animations and games in the ’90s and intentions, will finally officially kick off the bucket in 2021. Adobe will stop updating and downloading Flash Player on Thursday and block it on January 12th. Microsoft will block it by the start of the new year from almost all versions of Windows, and major browsers like Chrome and Firefox will block Flash extensions and join Safari, which it already does.
It’s the long-awaited demise of a technology from an earlier era of the Internet, a remnant of when there were fewer standards for making audio and video in the industry, making Flash an easy way for people with different computers and browsers to see the same content. Before memes became a household concept, Flash cartoons and games were a dominant form of internet culture.
But it’s driven by errors and tends to get hacked, especially as newer versions try to keep up with the Internet’s speeds and file sizes and browsers can handle better applications, said Tarah Wheeler, a cybersecurity contributor at the Belfer Center for Science and Belff, told Harvard University. Foreign Affairs.
“It was a guaranteed way to export these often very large files (remember that it took a long time to download media files and you were MAL when they would not play?”, Wheeler said in a text message .
“However, guaranteeing that audio and video files would run on a system that Flash had sometimes meant that your guests would detect mud through the door and onto your nice clean carpets,” she said.
A handful of projects aim to preserve existing Flash content after the end date. One open source program called Ruffle translates specific Flash files that are readable by modern browsers.
The Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library, has an ongoing project to use Ruffle to retain the most influential games and videos that thrived during Flash’s heyday, software curator Jason Scott said.
“There’s a very small layer of this culture, and it’s being buried in 2006,” when video streaming began to become more common, he said.
“In the archive, we uploaded a few thousand flash animations, games, and programs, with the only downside being that I had to manually verify them,” Scott said. “Where I can, I tried to get them in the archive,” do not worry: we have 200 deliveries of the Strongbad emails. ”
Much of the use of Flash over the past few years has been through the cottage industry of sites like Kongregate, Armor Games and Addicting Games that eliminate bright, simple browser games. They had to phase out Flash in favor of games written in more contemporary languages.
“It’s bitterly sweet because in terms of Flash and the impact it had on the creative community, it was probably the most effective set of tools for the indie developer that still exists,” said Bill Karamouzis, CEO of Addicting Games. said. said.
“In recent years, security has been a concern and legal achievement, but early on, Flash enabled many people to be creative on the Internet,” he said.
‘The game library is probably the largest collection of game titles ever created. “Many of them are of dubious quality, but there is no doubt when it comes to the actual number,” said Karamouzis.
The end date of Flash is not a surprise for developers: it has been fixed since 2017. But a number of businesses around the world that use it for various internal purposes, such as employee training or management software, are suddenly scrambling for a solution, Stefano said. De Rossi, CEO of Leaning Technologies, a web software development company that last year launched an application that makes the Flash content of a website look functional and normal.
‘One week before the deadline, we are contacted by banks, large defense contractors, all kinds of companies. It is honestly remarkable, “he said.
Such businesses are resisting the urge to rebuild their internal Flash applications from scratch, De Rossi said.
“You can see companies resisting this and hoping that some kind of expansion is announced over time,” he said. “I’ve even heard several people say, ‘Sure with Covid, it’s going to be postponed. ‘