Flash - farewell to a piece of Internet history
The end of Adobe Flash Player (1), an add-on for web browsers, gave websites a lot of animation and interactivity. It can be said that Flash will become part of history, although there are initiatives to preserve it as a kind of entertainment hobby, a bit like vinyl records.
Released in 1996, Flash was one of the most popular video streaming and publishing technologies in its time. онлайн игры. Shortly after reaching the peak of popularity, it fell into the world of smartphones. For many years he has collected huge reserves Flash security. After all, last year Adobe announced that it would no longer offer security updates for the program and urged users to remove it from their browsers. The once-powerful plugin received its latest update on December XNUMX. Major web browsers such as Apple Safari, Flash support is disabled at the end of the year. The deadline for showing films and animations is January 12.
The first "viral" pages on the Internet
In August 1996, after many attempts, a group of developers from FutureWave, together with Jonathan Gay, who has been working on graphics products since 1992, presented to the public FutureSplash Animator with the version of their plug-in for the player over the network based on Javiwhich did not work well in the then dominant browser Netscapebut good enough Internet Explorerthat managed to convince Internet users to install it.
Microsoft managers became interested in the product, and from the Disney subscription service The Daily Blast, who believed that FutureSplash it will be perfect for their children's online multimedia content. From them, in turn, they learned about the Macromedia program, which soon agreed to acquire FutureWave. In May 1997, just a few months later, Macromedia entered the market. Flash 2 – with audio sync, photo import and auto tracing (to convert bitmaps to vector format) as a standout feature.
When Flash gained access to the network, its users connected using telephone modems. The transfer speed of the time meant that loading regular static photos was sometimes a problem. It was hard to think about animation and films. In this sense The Flash ushered in a new era and entered into it without demanding too much at once. "It can create a full three-minute animation with multiple characters, backgrounds, sounds and music in less than two megabytes that can be viewed in a browser," explained animator David Firth in a commemorative text on the Flash's departure on the BBC website.
Sites with Flash products they were the early counterparts of today's socially proliferating "viral" mechanisms. One of the most famous was the site Newgrounds, nicknamed "YouTube of the golden age of Flash." They appeared to meet the growing demand for animation and interactive games. “It was the first website that allowed anyone to post content and was available in real time,” Firth continues.
In 1998 of the year Flash already firmly entrenched in the network. Its popularity grew among creative artists who saw the Internet as a new and interesting medium. Key feature along with ease of use drawing tools i plugs for network playerwhat together formed the core of Flash was its versatility, its ability to combine multimedia content with interactivity. The Flash development environment has grown rapidly. One of the first prominent developers of Flash was Tom Fulp, which operates the aforementioned Newgrounds website. “Flash was the creative tool I always dreamed of,” recalls Ars Technica Fulp. "Easier to mix animation and code." Programming language Flash ActionScript (created by Gary Grossman) appeared in 2000 at the premiere Flash 5.
The Flash's career was fast-paced. The developers of the program wondered if it was necessary to enter online video world. Several corporate giants already had their own network video solutions. Macromedia decided to enter the video market, and after a while established cooperation with a small startup called YouTubein which Flash was the main format until 2015.
Jobs pronounces judgment
In the starting year YouTube Macromedia and Flash were bought by Adobe. The world seemed to be open to the Flash. However, it was not yet an Internet standard in the full sense of the word. Gradually HTML i CSS became more productive. The implementation of these and other Internet solutions, incl. SVG i JavaScriptbecame more and more common. Over time, Flash began to lose its original competitive edge on the web.
However, he continued to develop. Under the auspices of Adobe Flash Player added to his proposal, among other things, 3D rendering, and Adobe introduced it there Flexible constructor and the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) products, which made Flash a full-platform application environment with countless supported Computer systems i phone calls. By 2009, according to Adobe, Flash was installed on 99% of computers connected to the Internet. Now they're just for grabs Cell phones...
Heavy Flash did not perform well in small, especially cheap devices. Stripped down version created Flash Light, which in some places, for example in Japan, was very popular, but so far there have been problems with its correct operation in smartphones and compatibility.
The historical blow fell on Apple. open titled "Thoughts on Flash" in which he explained why Apple would not allow the program to run on the iPhone and iPad. It is said to be very tiring to deal with touch screen, is unreliable, poses a security risk, and drains device batteries. As he summarized, movies and animations can be delivered to Apple devices using HTML5 and other open solutions, which means that the tablet is a redundant element.
It is believed that the reason is so decisive Jobs' abandonment of Flash and his company were not the only cons. Earlier, Adobe provided a new version of the program, specially adapted for smartphones. It did not help. Jobs also didn't give Flash a chance because of Apple's strategy, which from the very beginning was aimed at creating its own application ecosystem, and Flash was a foreign body in it, an external product.
It was a verdict. Another great Netflix i YouTubestarted streaming their videos to smartphones without Flash. In 2015, Apple disabled the plugin by default in its Safari browser, while Chrome Google started blocking some Flash content For security reasons. Adobe itself has acknowledged that other technologies such as HTML5, are mature enough to be a "true alternative" without requiring users to install and update a specific plugin, and finally in 2011 they abandoned the development of mobile tools and moved them to HTML5. In July 2017, the company announced that it would end support for Flash in 2020.
Life after death
Death of the Flash this is not a cause for great mourning. For years, the plug-in has been known to crash, create vulnerabilities, and make websites unnecessarily overloaded. However, some feel sorry for the Flash. In addition, there were fears that the archives of animations, games and interactive websites collected over the years would be lost, such as the "achievements" of players in popular on Facebook many years ago FarmVille video game (3) since its developer Zynga shut it down at the end of 2020.
3. Farmville is one of the most famous flash games
For those who feel sorry for Flash, and most of all the creations created in it, the general start of developers gathered in a project known as ruffle developed and continues to develop emulation software that can play Flash content in a web browser without the need for a plug-in. This software is used on a website offering the history of the Internet - I.internet archive.
For owner Windows computer best way to recreate old content Flash is Flashpoint, a free program with access to more than 70 online games and 8 animations, most of which are based on Flash technology. (Experimental versions for Mac and Linux are also available, but are difficult to set up.) Standard version of the program Flash point allows you to download any game on demand from the main list, but you can also download the entire archive at once if you have 532 GB of memory.
FlashPoint runs a standalone Flash "projector" that is not included in the standard Adobe installation and does not connect to the Internet, except when the game is being loaded to play. For games that require a connection to their source sites, FlashPoint runs a local proxy server that essentially tricks games into thinking they're on the Internet. This process is much safer than running Flash in the normal way, and is not affected by Adobe's disabling of Flash support. Another "nostalgic" program, conifer tree, allows you to run an older Flash-enabled browser on a remote computer, isolating the user from any security concerns. It is offered by Rhizome, a group of artists who primarily use it to create interactions with Flash illustration.
Legendary Newgrounds released its own Flash Player for Windows, which securely loads content from its site, so you still have a full experience of the correct use of Newgrounds is licensed by Adobe to distribute one of the versions of the program Flash Player despite the end of its operation.
It should be added that, technically, Flash as a development solution will continue to work. Flash development tool is part of the program Adobe animatewhile the rendering engine is part of the program Adobe AIRit will be taken over by Harman International, an enterprise electronics company, for ongoing maintenance as it continues to be widely used in the enterprise arena.
