Flash (Adobe Flash)
Born 1996. Died 31 December 2020.
Flash passed on 31 December 2020, having lived twenty-four years as the medium in which the early web learned to move. Born in 1996 as FutureSplash Animator, it became Adobe Flash and gave the internet cartoons, games, and interfaces that no markup language could. At its peak it ran on nearly every computer. In April 2010, Steve Jobs published “Thoughts on Flash,” refusing to support it on the iPhone. He was not wrong about its flaws. The letter was a death sentence. Adobe abandoned mobile Flash in 2011. Browsers deprecated it. Open standards replaced it. Adobe announced the end in July 2017. On 31 December 2020, it stopped. He is survived by the archives that preserve what he made, and by the platforms that killed him.
We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.
Killed by platform
Mourned by Designers who built the web's first animations, gamers who grew up on Newgrounds and Kongregate, and anyone who remembers when the internet moved.
HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly, which Steve Jobs said would win; the Internet Archive, which preserves what Flash made; and every browser, which no longer runs it.