
Adobe to remove Flash Player from web site after December 2020 - michaelhoffman
https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/end-of-life.html
======
dang
All: Note that this thread has lots more comments than appear on this page.
Click 'More' at the bottom to see the rest.

------
j-james
Newgrounds has done a lot of work on preserving old Flash content. Some
standouts are their own Flash player and an SWF to MP4 converter, but what I
find most interesting is Ruffle.

Ruffle is a Flash emulator written in Rust that can be used as a browser
extension, a desktop client, or a website polyfill. It's still a work in
progress, but eventually websites with heavy use of Flash content (like many
late-2000s webcomics, or even Newgrounds itself) could use the polyfill to
replace Flash content with WASM blobs.

The roadmap was updated recently, and provides a good overview of Ruffle's
current capabilities. There's also a demo instance that can run arbitary SWFs,
with a few examples available.

[https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player](https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player)

[https://github.com/Herschel/Swivel](https://github.com/Herschel/Swivel)

[https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle](https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle)

Roadmap: [https://github.com/ruffle-
rs/ruffle/wiki/Roadmap](https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/wiki/Roadmap)

Demo: [http://ruffle-rs.s3-website-us-
west-1.amazonaws.com/builds/w...](http://ruffle-rs.s3-website-us-
west-1.amazonaws.com/builds/web-demo/index.html?file=synj1.swf)

~~~
londons_explore
I don't really understand why this isn't the migration path for any legacy
tech... Just containerize and emulate it. If there is a security problem, it's
only inside your container. No big deal.

~~~
IshKebab
Because re-implementing Flash is an _enormous_ amount of work. Back when Flash
was popular there were numerous attempts to reimplement it for use on Linux.
None of them really got beyond the proof of concept stage.

Based on that I'm pretty skeptical that Ruffle will succeed, although I guess
it does have the huge advantage that Flash is no longer a moving target and
they really only have to get it to work with existing Flash movies - nobody is
creating new ones.

~~~
thdrdt
As far as I remember it was difficult to re-implement because the Flash player
was backwards compatible with all Flash versions. And this was also why there
were so many security issues.

~~~
userbinator
I believe it was mainly legal issues that the community, with their obsession
with the purity of open-source, didn't want to accept contributions from those
who had done any RE'ing of the official implementation.

The SWF format itself is tiny in comparison to the web standards like HTML,
JS, or CSS.

~~~
ZenPsycho
I spent a bit of time trying to figure out why previous reimplementation
efforts didn't get anywhere. Here's where they get stuck

swf format: 100% implemented

Tamarind AS3 VM: Open sourced by adobe.

AS1, AS2, AS3: Not technically 100% but effectively so

Flash platform API: Enormous and bug ridden, like mapping the coastline of
finland. you can get 90% through this and have 90% to go, over and over again
for however many decades you care to work on it. It's not like the stuff here
is _hard_ , it's just the sheer quantity of stuff, like, for instance, the
precise way that XML whitespace gets parsed by the XML parser into a DOM
matters. The gamma interpretation of RGBA colours. And so on.

Flash rendering pipeline: No one has succeeded in figuring out how this works,
at all. You can get far enough for strongbad, but for 100% compatibility, the
CheerpX approach is the only one that I think has any chance of success.

~~~
efreak
Your reply to this comment is dead for some reason. As a response: I really,
really wish Mozilla hadn't abandoned Shumway. I also wish they'd written it as
a standalone translator instead of making it depends on Firefox. The worst
part is that I've got several flash sites I used to visit that are still
around, but now can't be used because even though they worked with Shumway,
Shumway itself no longer works with Firefox.

~~~
ZenPsycho
I was shadowbanned by dang for expressing disappointment in some HN
commenter's defense of coronavirus conspiracy videos. I really wish there were
a way to delete my account and all my posts, but this is apparently the best
they can do.

also, you may be interested in the openflash project

[https://github.com/open-flash](https://github.com/open-flash)

and the shuobject api

[https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/blob/16451d8836fa85f4b16e...](https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/blob/16451d8836fa85f4b16eeda8b4bda2fa9e2b22b0/extension/shuobject/examples/demo.html)

~~~
demurgos
Open-Flash author here. Open-Flash was originally intended to be a fork of
Shumway, but it ultimately became a fully separate project intended to
provided modular libraries to handle SWF files. I had less time to push the
project forward in the last few months.

It currently provides one of the strongest models for parsed SWF files and
AVM1 bytecode, and the corresponding parsers and emitters. These libraries are
in use to process SWF files automatically (remap identifiers, edit tags,
compress files). The end goal was to provide a player, but Ruffle already has
relatively good support, so the goal is shifting to automatically convert SWF
files to other languages and help with migrations. The current focus is on
AVM1 (Actionscript 2) decompilation.

------
throw_m239339
Flash became popular because of 2 things:

1/ Its IDE which made creating creative and interactive content mixing
video/vector graphics sounds and code easier

2/ it's API that provided things that were not possible when browsers had none
of these API (video streaming, socket programming...). At some point you could
even write 2D shaders or inject C/C++ code with something called Alchemy.

Point 2 is now largely covered by browser web API, although one might argue
that the performances might not be always as good as they were in flash,
especially when it comes to vector graphics or realtime audio processing. But
3D and webgl are more performant than flash in the browser.

Point 1: well there isn't really an equivalent, and even Adobe Animate isn't
really doing exactly what flash did when it comes to authoring content for
browsers. So there is still a potential market here. I'd like to see something
node based when it comes to coding. Artists love their nodes.

The real problem is obviously running old flash content like games. Some of
these games were really good. I remember playing one which was a hotel
management simulator and it was really really fun. But it's a bit like a these
jar games in the 2000' one cannot run on modern mobile phones anymore. Without
an effort to preserve these, they will all be lost.

~~~
bsder
> 1/ Its IDE which made creating creative and interactive content mixing
> video/vector graphics sounds and code easier

Why is it that with all our computer power, we somehow can't create _authoring
tools_ as good as we had in the past?

HyperCard, DreamWeaver, Visual Basic 6, etc. all seem to be _dramatically_
better for common people (read: not career programmers) than any modern
equivalent we have.

~~~
SXX
Your common people back then were far more computer-literate than most of
career programmers today. Requirements for the entry into profession is so
much lower from any point of view: time, difficulty and cost.

Another side is that programming and web is no longer novelty so common people
prefer to just pay for someone else for their time rather than learn anything
on their own.

Most people prefer to pay their auto mechanic, plumber or electrician even
though most of people are capable of fixing many of their problems just by
following simple tutorial and common sense. Programming is no different here:
it's just easier or more time efficient to pay to someone else.

~~~
TylerE
Plus life is so much easier when you don’t have to worry about i18n,
encryption of any kind, HiDPI displays, Unicode of any sort, really any of
dozens of things that modern users expect to just work.

~~~
anthk
Sometimes you had. Timezones, encryption for sensitive places, zillions of
European standards (one PER language), and so on.

------
htk
I don't know if everyone here is familiar with this, but the decline of Flash
began or was greatly influenced by Apple's decision to not let flash run on
iPhones/iPads. Steve Jobs even wrote an open letter about it[1].

[1][https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-
flash/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/)

~~~
asciident
I think that's rewriting history a bit. The decline certainly didn't begin
with Apple's decision. Apple saw where things were headed, and jumped on (an
early) bandwagon. Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point.
I hope in a few years people don't start saying that Apple killed Flash, as I
remember specifically that was not what happened at that time.

~~~
radley
Sorry, that is precisely what happened.

In the Linux / programming world Flash was a pariah that didn't conform to
their standards. But it was booming for creatives and end-users. In 2010,
almost all websites used Flash video and Flash gaming was exploding on
Facebook. (Apple had to fake their Keynote to demonstrate the iPhone could
view the "entire internet.")

Security complaints are a weak argument: both Apple and Google have had
security issues on their proprietary platforms. (I'll concede Adobe was a very
poor steward.)

Jobs' hit job was a calculated sucker punch, leveraging an exciting new
platform to lock out competition. The iPhone wasn't powerful enough to play
Flash and made Apple look weak. The iPhone business model depends on consumer
lock-down, so making Flash compatible was counter-productive.

~~~
CharlesW
> _The iPhone wasn 't powerful enough to play Flash…_

No, Flash Lite ran on significantly-less-powerful feature phones. (Remember,
in the early days of the iPhone, Flash was desktop-only.[1])

> _Jobs ' hit job was a calculated sucker punch, leveraging an exciting new
> platform to lock out competition._

You speak as if Jobs instigated this when in reality, this was a response to
Adobe holding Jobs' platforms hostage for a long time, and in many ways.
Flash's ongoing instability and inefficiency on MacOS was just the straw that
broke the camel's back.

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2010/04/adobe-flash-
jobs/](https://www.wired.com/2010/04/adobe-flash-jobs/): _" Flash was designed
for the desktop world, for web and large screens, not the user experiences you
want to create in these new devices with touch, accelerometers and GPS," Luh
said. "It wasn't designed with that in mind at all."_

~~~
duskwuff
Roughly nothing used Flash Lite, outside of a few weird embedded use cases
like the Chumby. Web content was almost exclusively full-on Flash.

~~~
CharlesW
> _Roughly nothing used Flash Lite, outside of a few weird embedded use cases
> like the Chumby._

I recall it a bit differently. By December 2006, Adobe claimed that Flash Lite
had shipped on 220 million devices[1].

That was probably the apex, though — by 2010, it was all over.

> _Web content was almost exclusively full-on Flash._

Yes, always IIRC. Flash Lite content wasn't delivered via the web.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Lite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Lite)

~~~
rescbr
I remember installing Opera and Flash Lite in my Windows Mobile smartphone and
it being able to run Flash content. Was it a sluggish hand warmer? Sure, but
then it was a 300 MHz TI OMAP (overclocked, of course!) and at most 128 MB of
RAM, probably even less.

~~~
CharlesW
Interesting! I stand corrected about it not working in mobile browsers, thank
you.

------
srathi
Someone please give this memo to Citibank which still uses Flash for their
virtual credit card number feature! [1]

[1] [https://www.cardbenefits.citi.com/Products/Virtual-
Account-N...](https://www.cardbenefits.citi.com/Products/Virtual-Account-
Numbers)

~~~
mehrdadn
I dunno, maybe it's better if no one does. I expect they'd just remove the
feature instead of rewriting it.

~~~
e40
They'll lose me as a customer if they do. I suspect there are lots of other
people in the same boat.

~~~
jdofaz
CapitalOne also offers virtual numbers but only from a browser extension
called Eno

~~~
e40
Good to know, but I fled CapOne a year ago because they stopped supporting OFA
and broke Moneydance transaction downloading. And, I hate what their website
has become since the acquisition of Ing. Ing was great, I wish they never sold
to CapOne.

------
azinman2
“Adobe will be removing Flash Player download pages from its site and Flash-
based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL
Date.”

This blocking seems really dumb to me. At least throw up a warning. It will
cause old web content to be completely inaccessible, throwing away years of
human creativity. Most likely there will be some legacy systems somewhere that
will then use a hacked version of flash laden with malware because it’s the
only thing available so some legacy system written by long gone people can be
used.

~~~
cryptoz
I think hacked versions of Flash are statistically more likely to be secure
than the official version, though.

Why do you think that the official Flash player would provide a secure
environment going forward? It never has, and so without Adobe's active
support, I imagine it would get even worse. Official Flash has always been a
security nightmare.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
> I think hacked versions of Flash are statistically more likely to be secure
> than the official version, though.

I would think exactly the opposite, primarily because you have no idea who put
together that hacked copy. God knows there is already enough malware that
pretends to be an update to Adobe Flash.

------
Wowfunhappy
I didn’t have Flash on my computer for several years, but I installed it last
week. I'm planning to take the GRE, which is being given remotely due to
Covid. A proctor watches you through your webcam, which I find this completely
creepy, but what can I do?

Anyway, this system apparently requires Flash.

~~~
Majestic121
What is a GRE ?

~~~
lb1lf
A Graduate Record Examination; a standardized admission test.

If you hope to be admitted to grad school in the US (and Canada, methinks),
the GRE is mandatory at many, if not most, establishments.

~~~
asdff
The tide is starting to change although it is departmental specific. In
biology, some of the best departments in the nation are waiving the GRE
because wouldn't you know, being able to do high school algebra in a certain
amount of time and having a wide nonscientific vocabulary are not good
predictors of your ability as a scientist.

~~~
anderspitman
A more cynical explanation is they're willing to take anyone's money.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
If that were the case, they'd have to be also seeing fewer applicants, or
opening up more spots for students. (Since I'm not familiar with what GP is
referring to, I can't say if that's the case, but they would be much better
indicators.)

------
aclelland
I'm still confused by the statement 'Flash-based content will be blocked from
running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date.' are they literally going to
stop the flash player loading SWF files on the 1st of January?

~~~
user5994461
Browsers will prevent from loading all flash content?

They already block flash by default. The next step must be to remove the "run
anyway" button and ignore the flash plugin.

------
FillardMillmore
What are we to do about all the useful tools, pages and games that were either
written in or utilized Flash? I realize some of this stuff will be rewritten
in HTML5, but what about the things that are not?

How will we preserve all those classic flash games that we wasted our time
playing in the early 2000s?

~~~
shadowgovt
_shrug_ Never build a towering edifice on a closed-source, closed-protocol,
single-company-owned engine and infrastructure ever again, because there is no
solution to this problem?

~~~
Wowfunhappy
You're right, we should all write software exclusively for Linux, and then
only on RISC-V CPUs! :)

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
I mean, you joke, but that would make you immune to this kind of problem.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Right, and that's why I phrased it as I did. I agree with the great
grandparent, kind of—if you _have_ the ability to use 100% open technologies,
you absolutely should, and power to you!

But at the same time, proprietary technologies rules much of our world, back
then, now, and likely in the future.

~~~
shadowgovt
The difference between SWF and code written for RISC archtiectures is options.
The "single-company-owned" part is what killed SWF.

If there had been multiple SWF engines out there, to a common interpreter
protocol, SWF content might have had a better chance of outliving the death of
Adobe Flash.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
That's a fair point. I suppose it's not even guaranteed with FOSS, but open
source makes it much easier to not have one company totally control the
software/ecosystem, if nothing else because it keeps forking as an option.

------
jason0597
Why can't Adobe open source flash? It would be a massive help to people trying
to create alternative implementations of flash to keep legacy websites working

~~~
macintux
It was terribly insecure throughout its life. I can only imagine how many more
security vulnerabilities would be exposed once it goes open source.

~~~
jason0597
Does it really matter now? Pretty sure only nostalgic web users use flash to
view old games, clips and such

~~~
macintux
Apparently bank logins, online exams...

------
omnibrain
I have
[http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html](http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html)
in my bookmarks. A really beautiful depiction of the Sixtine Chapel. But I
have no Idea how to load it on a modern OS. I have also no idea if the vatican
has plans to update ist for more modern technologies.

There are even more
[http://www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/index_en.html](http://www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/index_en.html)
if you dig around a little, but I have no clue how to preserve them...

------
space_ghost
Installing Flash used to be one of the very first things I did when
configuring a new system. Now? I can't even remember the last time I actually
used it.

~~~
merlyn
Because it is bundled in with most OSs now. You have it without even realizing
it. ... For now ...

------
Jonnax
Is there a standalone player for old flash content? If people wanted to still
view old things created in it.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Yes, Adobe makes Flash Projector:

• Windows:
[https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3...](https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/32/flashplayer_32_sa.exe)

• Mac:
[https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3...](https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/32/flashplayer_32_sa.dmg)

• Linux:
[https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3...](https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/32/flash_player_sa_linux.x86_64.tar.gz)

You can just open the swf file you want and run it directly. It's great.

Linux users might alternately want to use the community-packaged Flatpak:
[https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.adobe.Flash-Player-
Proj...](https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.adobe.Flash-Player-Projector)
All other links come from
[https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht...](https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.html)

Kind of stupid that these will also presumably be removed from Adobe's
official download page, since this is exactly how Flash content ought to be
run going forwards: as individual legacy files you've downloaded and
inspected. I would advise downloading and backing up a copy now.

~~~
josephcsible
This won't work in practice for most Flash games. They're almost all "site-
locked", so they refuse to execute anywhere except in a browser on the domain
where they came from.

~~~
andai
I know SWFs can be decompiled -- can they be modified? Can the sitelock code
be disabled or altered?

~~~
josephcsible
Yes, but I don't think it's something that would easily be automated, so every
game would have to have its protection reverse engineered by hand.

------
micheljansen
Flash was a dumpster fire of performance and security issues and being a
closed platform in direct competition with the web we have today, I won’t shed
a tear over this.

What will be sorely missed though, are the brilliant authoring tools that
Flash came with. For a very short time in history there was one tool that
allowed designers and developers to truly collaborate on rich interactive
experiences. It was amazing what that unlocked.

------
qwertox
I don't get it why my Windows 10 installation is still downloading updates for
Flash Player. I deselected it in some setting which was to be found somewhere
(Windows 10 settings are a horrible maze), but for some reason it still thinks
it needs to protect me from this deactivated piece of malware.

------
egberts1
I think I can speak for millions of security-minded folks: Well, it’s about
time.

------
notRobot
This has been a looooooong time coming. Very few websites still use flash.

The only sad thing about it is that it'll become much harder to play thousands
of old-school flash games.

~~~
jimbob45
[https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player](https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player)

Newgrounds, at least, will never have its players lose the ability to play its
old Flash games.

------
terrycody
Gosh, I always think the websites in the FLASH era is the most versatile and
really have no limitations, just see today's websites, all plain, simple, and
boring as hell. Yeah I can understand the vulnerabilities and slowdown of
Flash, but it really shines at that golden age! R.I.P

~~~
machiaweliczny
It was so simple to create 2D games. Is there some comparable engine/tool
nowadays?

~~~
terrycody
I am not an expert in the gaming field, but you can check Godot engine for 2D
games, people say it is a really amazing tool. Of course you can choose Unity,
but many people now prefer Godot for 2D games.

I mean, the Flash maybe not the best option for creating a game, but for Flash
website era, I think those weird, funny, and highly interactive websites are
really shining at the age, I miss that time!

------
glaberficken
Just to share this archival project:

[https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/](https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/)

Basically it's a massive bundle of flash (and other plugins) together with a
curated list of games and animations. It spawns a local web server to trick
the games into "thinking" they are still being run on their original servers
(this doesn't work for games that required a multiplayer server obviously,
it's only to workaround the common portal exclusivity rights that were common
in the golden era of Flash games).

It's really a labor of love and an incredible window into a slice of web
history from the early 2000's

------
cosmotic
If it's of such low value that it's being discontinued and all the browser
vendors are blocking it; why not open source?

~~~
dharmab
Flash evolved into Adobe Animate, which is used today for many television
shows:

[https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html](https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_television_series)

Disclaimer: I work for Adobe, but not on Animate.

~~~
Dylan16807
I doubt open sourcing the player would hurt that revenue stream.

------
bbayer
Flash Player itself has a lot of security vulnerabilities but Adobe Flash as
IDE still has no competitor even today IMHO. There is no such tool that
combines code and graphics with ease like Adobe Flash. You can use it as an
animator, you can use it as graphic designer, you can use it as developer. All
these features just came together perfectly and it made sense. I am still
missing this usability.

------
vangelis
The internet would be a lot duller without some of the creativity Flash
animations allowed, imagine a world without Cirno's Perfect Math Class.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_bQNPG2OyE&](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_bQNPG2OyE&)

------
pull_my_finger
Good thing Haxe[1] and OpenFl[2] are around and doing well.

[1] - [https://haxe.org/](https://haxe.org/)

[2] - [https://www.openfl.org/](https://www.openfl.org/)

------
userbinator
In other words, they are implicitly telling us that we should archive their
entire site... although I suspect the IA has already done so.

The only thing really bad about Flash was the security, but otherwise it is an
extremely efficient vector/animation format that AFAIK none of the "open
standards" have managed to come close to. Seeing Flash disappear, only to be
replaced by SVG (yuck!), JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, was extremely disturbing.

(I have written a SWF to PDF converter. Parsing the format itself is quite
straightforward, I could've probably written most of a player if I went
further and added the interactive stuff too.)

~~~
snazz
Security, the fact that it was a closed standard, touchscreen support, battery
life... most of the issues brought up by Steve Jobs are still valid:
[https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-
flash/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/)

~~~
userbinator
_the fact that it was a closed standard_

The standard has been freely available for over a decade now.

 _touchscreen support_

That's an implementation issue.

 _battery life_

Also an implementation issue. Jobs was talking _only_ about video, but I bet
the "instruction path length" from reading a file to rendering a vector
graphic is probably an order of magnitude if not more for a browser reading an
SVG than Flash reading a SWF.

Those who have played Flash games will likely remember its very acceptable
performance on a sub-GHz processor with 128MB of RAM or less. I don't think
the HTML5 equivalent in a modern browser would even work on such a system.

That said, it was much better when it was _Macromedia_ Flash, i.e. after Adobe
bought it they bloated it greatly (which is where most of the security
problems came from.)

------
pengaru
Kongregate's John Cooney did a flash games postmortem @ GDC which seems
appropriate here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65crLKNQR0E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65crLKNQR0E)

------
haolez
Genuine question: if Flash weren't a security nightmare, would it be a better
environment for producing games and dynamic content than what we have today?
I've never done anything in Flash.

~~~
andai
Add-on question: what _do_ we have today? Has anything filled this void?

~~~
stjo
HTML5, the canvas API and all the new browser APIs right after it.

------
jdofaz
I never played any flash games and I never really understood the difference
between the flash and shockwave plugins for games, but , I always installed
flash because it was a wonderful video player. Before flash video was common
most things were quicktime and the quicktime plugin was SLOW.

The other nice thing about flash is unlike quicktime there was a linux
version.

Sure, flash is obsolete and unloved now, but it really was better than what
came before it.

------
dandare
I just came here to say the Flash IDE was the best vector graphics editor I
knew and I have not find a replacement. The way the color of two objects was
used to determine the boolean operation between them was brilliant. You could
add a bezier point by dragging a selection through a surface, you could remove
a bezier point by narrowing the surface. The aligning gizmo always worked the
way you needed it to work.

------
firloop
I wonder how much this will enable another wave of "Adobo Flash Player Browser
Toolbar"-like adware since the official source will be removed.

------
kumarvvr
Flash is a good candidate for webassembly as target.

Add updated controls for touch, discourage usage of hover, and compile the
flash player to web assembly, targeting animations, ads, etc. Then provide a
paid cdn for deliveeing content.

I remember using flash a long time ago, and what i loved most is the way you
could do complex animations with such little effort.

~~~
voldacar
If Adobe could re-release the flash IDE but make it target webassembly, it
would probably be a hit if they marketed it right. I don't think there's
anything since that has surpassed the flash development experience

------
dsthode
I won't say it's not about time, but the decision to block the execution of
flash content after said date and the removal of the downloads, complicates
matters for system administrators.

We have a legacy blade enclosure at the office that needs an old version of
flash for configuration, and also our vSphere web interface is flash based.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
One of my fave Flash animations was a Stick Figure Animation, called "Time to
Die."

I don't know if it can still be found anywhere, but it was a riot (and rather
bloody).

You would pick which weapon they would "test," and one of the choices would
result in a Snake Pliskin-type of character getting loose, and slaughtering
everyone.

------
WhyNotHugo
TIL Flash still exists on other platforms.

Flash was dropped around 10 years ago for Linux, and never existed on iOS.

I'd no idea it was still a thing on other platforms.

I do feel bad in that we've lost the ability to run lots of games, but most of
them were to trivial to download/redistribute anyway, regrettably. Their fate
was kinda already sealed.

------
askjdlkasdjsd
Welcome news!

This guy is trying to emulate x86 in the browser and run the actual Flash
player within that:

[https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-
webassembly-...](https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-
using-cheerpx-an-update-d500b6fbc44e)

------
asmosoinio
Discussion from 2017 when Adobe released the end-of-life information:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848786)
\- “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of
2020”

------
tomklein
I’ve got flashbacks to the time when I started creating my first website at a
young age in the 2000s. Flash was this unreachable height for me and I just
started testing HTML and how the internet even works. Now I’m a full time
software engineer and happy on how far the web has gone until today :)

------
pmlnr
Happy Tree Friends, Weebls' Stuff, z0r.de - the internet would be - will be! -
different without Flash.

------
bookmarkable
I miss Flash. It was fun. The web was fun. We got paid to make stuff move
around and come up with crazy image masking animations and just experiment.
The product had to go, but sadly, it would have no place in today’s much more
serious web anyway.

Long live Macromedia and (F)uture Sp(lash) Animator.

------
aasasd
I hoped to live to the day when Flash is dead, so at least something good has
happened in my life (a few years ago already).

Now, looking forward to PDF being abandoned for scientific publication and
‘white papers’.

------
taf2
I remember around 2007 a tower defense came - desktop tower defense by hand
drawn games... I guess that flash version is long gone but did find it nice
wish someone would build an html5 version

------
tosh
Steve Jobs on Flash 10 years ago:

[https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-
flash/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/)

------
1MachineElf
The little HN reader in me thinks this is great news, but the other part of me
is worried because %DAYJOB% is providing support for a product that depends
majorly on Adobe Flash (and IE11).

------
bgorman
It would be nice if Adobe could release some of Flash player as open source,
or at least help document the format to help preserve the content that made
Adobe so much money in the past.

------
hartator
We still don’t have an easy way to make Flash-like games that work in the
browser across platform.

Shame on Adobe for killing all Macromedia products. Fireworks, Macromedia, and
Flash.

~~~
dpcan
I still use Fireworks every day. It's the best graphic design tool ever
created in my opinion. Everything else has become so complicated. With my
Adobe Cloud subscription they still let me download it thankfully, but I'm a
little worried that in 5 years, when I upgrade my PC, I'll never be able to
install it again.

------
alexashka
End of an era. I grew up learning how to use Flash and did little animations
and even some websites in it. It was a lovely platform for non-programmer
types.

------
zelly
Probably because no one uses it since most of the world is on Chrome. If G is
maintaining the Pepper flash player for free, why would Adobe need to bother.

------
sitzkrieg
my biggest hope is that government entities stop making training content in
flash. the freaking DISA cybersecurity training is in flash for crying out
loud

------
prvc
Yet, somehow, Flash Player updates are now being distributed through Windows
Update (to systems where Flash was never purposefully installed).

------
anessaiver
Looks like we only have a short time left to sit the younger generation down
and force them to sit through all of Strong Bad's emails.

------
tekstar
Don't worry, there will still be thousands of sites hosting flash player
update exes just waiting for you to download

------
davidgerard
So, there have been a pile of open source Flash emulation efforts - gnash,
Shumway ...

They all seem to get half way then flounder.

What's up with that?

------
Wowfunhappy
So, while it's still easily available, are there any particular flash games or
content I should check out?

------
ellisv
Interestingly clicking on the link in Safari prompts a "Would you like to use
Flash?" user dialog...

------
qwerty456127
I feel like I'm going to make a a VirtualBox image dedicated purely for Flash
viewing.

------
cairoshikobon
Does this mean we won't be able to access zombo.com anymore ?

Truly an end of an era :(

~~~
cpeterso
Welcome to HTML5 Zombo Com! The only limit is yourself.
[https://html5zombo.com/](https://html5zombo.com/)

------
pier25
Adobe announced it in _2017_.

That's how it's done, Apple.

------
cwojno
Wait... this didn't happen like 5 years ago?

------
ohsik
It's time to go lol

------
senthilnayagam
why did Adobe not open source core flash technology?

------
matlo
RIP

------
saos
Good news

------
ryanmarsh
Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out

------
afrcnc
This was announced in 2017. It's already removed from all browsers already.

~~~
calebegg
Still works fine for me in Chrome 83.

~~~
FakeRemore
Apparently it's being removed in January 2021.

[https://www.chromium.org/flash-roadmap#TOC-Flash-Support-
Rem...](https://www.chromium.org/flash-roadmap#TOC-Flash-Support-Removed-from-
Chromium-Target:-Chrome-88---Jan-2021-)

