It’s truly the end of an era. Adobe has discontinued their iconic Flash Player, as the company won’t be offering any kind of security updates starting January 1st, 2021. Why is it such a big deal, though?
Simply put, in the early days of the World Wide Web, Adobe’s Flash Player was THE way for even people with extremely slow dial-up modems to access gaming and video content relatively easily. Sites like Newgrounds were home to iconic games like Stickman, as well as the infamous Salad Fingers video that was essentially a meme before things like that could spread like wildfire on social media.
As BBC notes, it “was once one of the most popular ways for people to stream videos and play games online”, but its technology was outdated once the era of the smartphone rolled around. Much has also been made about what will happen to some of these old Flash games that provide a time capsule into Internet history, but fear not – many of these have already been transferred to HTML5.
Really, though, it’s the end of an era. For years, Flash Player was the go-to program for content and program developers to host their creations – quite easily, really. And needless to say, sites like Newgrounds and the immortal Miniclip were huge time killers for kids and teens growing up. The good news is that it’s not completely gone – thanks to a killer Internet archive.
Farewell, Flash. We’ll miss you.
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