Discontinuation of Adobe Flash
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| ♥ | This article is dedicated to Adobe Flash (November 1996 - December 31, 2020) |
Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia software platform used for the production of animations, rich web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players. Flash was initially used to create fully interactive websites, but this approach was phased out with the introduction of HTML5. Instead, Flash found a niche as the dominant platform for online multimedia content, particularly for browser games. One of Adobe's flagship software, Adobe Flash Professional (now Adobe Animate), alongside the ActionScript programming language, was used to create browser games such as Papa's Pizzeria, Club Penguin, Nitrome games, and many more.
Before Flash, Macromedia also had Director/Shockwave (which was also used for both games and animation, including the Ezone Lenny Loosejocks games, several 3D games, and Bathtime in Clerkenwell's music video which was animated with Director. Director was eventually phased out due to its limitations and overlap with Flash.
Despite being ubiquitous and the go-to platform for many great browser games during its heyday, Flash Player was criticized for performance issues and its lack of security that can be exploited by hackers, as the usage of Flash plugins prompts the generation of a shared library file (like .dll), which can be exploited by hackers to inject malware or initiate malicious activities. While these issues may seem overblown to most people, these kinds of security issues are much bigger concerns for corporations than normal consumers, and these security issues date back to the 2000s when viruses and malware were much more common than nowadays.
TGX Game Reviews (who had rebranded to Tactical Bacon Productions) said in his Thing-Thing retrospective video that his laptop was overheating when he was playing Thing-Thing 4 on the opening cutscene where the framerate dropped a lot. This is likely attributed to how shapes upscale flawlessly on higher resolutions, though at the cost of performance. While this performance problem is no longer an issue with today's CPUs combined with solid-state drives, these performance issues can also be attributed to where each patch that tried to fix a security issue ended up making it less optimized, especially on newer browsers. The biggest examples of Adobe Flash being very unoptimized were Bloons Tower Defense 4 and 5, as those two Flash games had tons of particle effects on screen, causing them to lag very easily, which in 5, the game even warned you about lag when you entered the endless Freeplay mode. This is why after Bloons Monkey City, Ninja Kiwi stopped using Flash for the remastered Steam release and switched over to Unity in Bloons Tower Defense 6.
On April 29, 2010, an open letter from Steve Jobs was published criticizing Adobe Flash Player not being supported on Apple's iOS operating systems like the iPhone and iPad due to poor performances on mobile devices and battery consumption. Apple didn't want their devices to be on a third-party company, causing Adobe to end support for Flash Player on mobile web browsers in November 2011. Then, everything changed in July 2017, when Adobe announced that they would end support for Flash by the end of 2020. The announcement was then coordinated with major web browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox.
On January 14, 2021, Adobe completely ended support for Adobe Flash Player for web browsers, however leaving the standalone versions of the software still available for download, allowing Flash games that don't require internet connection to be played offline. However, it is still hard to download a majority of them from some sites using links from their pages' source codes, as some of them don't implement the download link to the .swf file. The last version of Flash Player is 32.0.0.465, which was released by Adobe on December 8, 2020. With HTML5 being overall more powerful than Flash, some former Flash game developers have remastered their games by porting them to HTML as a result of the announcement of the discontinuation of Flash. Additionally, there is a project named Flashpoint in development by BlueMaxima, intending to preserve a large number of Flash games after the discontinuation of Adobe Flash Player.
Why This Discontinuation Sucks
- While the shutdown was understandable considering how the emulator turned out with hackers, it also caused certain Flash games, especially with MMO games such as Neopets, Marapets, and Club Penguin Private Servers to be shut down, which was pretty disappointing. Luckily however, some games have downloadable versions due to this.
- There are still many game portal websites that still have their games in Flash and are unable to migrate them to HTML5. For example, Facebook's FarmVille had shut down after 10 years due to Flash as they didn't bother upgrading to HTML5 or any standards that would work with the Facebook app.
- You can't use a different web browser to play Flash games since all browsers ended support for Flash unless your browser is too old (like the older versions of Internet Explorer), or using a forked version of Chrome/Firefox that runs on old/modified current version which support Flash while also still receiving security updates for the browser itself.
- Due to Flash's shutdown, the popular site Pogo.com has retired great games like Pogo Bowl. Very commonly associated with network decay, Edheads for example downgraded to only four HTML5 games (the Flash ones are already on Flashpoint and before that, could be found on the Wayback Machine before they changed to paid subscriptions which defeated the purpose of getting the subscription anyway)
- Adobe refused to keep it supported after 2020 because they keep insisting people transfer over to HTML5.
- There is no way to play Flash games after 2020 due to many of them being too old to migrate.
- It's nearly impossible to directly port Flash games to HTML5, so most games must be re-created from scratch.
- Adobe had the guts to include a timebomb on recent versions of Flash Player (after version 32.0.0.371 which was the last to have no timebomb), which locks up usage of Flash content past January 12, 2021. The timebomb also affects using Flash Player offline, making it impossible to even use Flash past that date. Thankfully, there is a way to stop Flash Player from updating automatically, but for those who already connected to the internet and got a new version of Flash installed already, it is too late now, unless you live in China (or using Clean Flash Player which is similar to China version but without spyware) using a special version of Flash that was still supported.
- On January 12, 2021, all Flash content has become unplayable, and you are now greeted with an icon that tells you about Flash's end of life.
- It also made the Newgrounds Player unable to play Flash games since it was still using Flash to run them, though someone seems to have found a work-around.
- Thankfully though, Flashpoint still works and has not been affected.
- The Chrome OS version of Chrome still allowed you to use Flash Player until February 2021 when Chrome disabled it.
- To make this worse, some sites have completely shut down due to this, one example being the site containing every game by developer Bart Bonte being rendered unusable due to this.
- This even caused some older printers to be rendered unusable due to their interface being created in Flash.
- This also caused a Chinese railroad station to shut down because they were operated with Flash, presumably the software they were using hadn't been updated for years.
Qualities That Shouldn't Have Been Discontinued
- The removal of Flash Player is at the very least justified for security and performance reasons, as the usage of Flash plugins prompts the generation of a shared library file (for example, .dll), which can be exploited by hackers to inject malware or initiate malicious activities. However, others have pointed out that most of these security issues were fixed years ago, with Flash declining in popularity which will make some hackers less interested in exploiting its security, while performance issues are rare on all modern PCs even when hardware is accelerated, rendering this reason nearly mood.
- At least some of the websites was able to move from Flash:
- BlueMaxima's Flashpoint project is working to preserve many Flash games and animations so that people can play and view Flash content after 2020. Plus, The Internet Archive is doing a similar goal.
- Some games are getting non-flash remakes via being ported to JavaScript or external applications, such as Happy Wheels, Pogo Bowl, and the entirety of Ninja Kiwi's game library (which has been ported to Steam under the name "Ninja Kiwi Archive").
- Some game portal sites can port some Flash games to HTML5 like Poki.
- There are some ways to avoid a discontinuation of Flash:
- You can, in theory, use older versions of Internet Explorer or other old browsers (forked such as Waterfox [version 3 or earlier only], Pale Moon, Basilisk, etc...) and use an old version of Windows like Windows XP-7 (or unpatched version of Windows 8 - 10) to play Flash games after 2020, though it is recommended you use a virtual machine or at least have an antivirus installed for these and not on an actual computer as old browsers, old Flash Player and operating systems tend to have security holes.
- You can also use alternative software other than Flash Player after 2020, Ruffle and Lightspark for example. Even better, both are open-source and can be played offline on your computer and your mobile device. The caveat, however, is that they currently might not be 100% compatible and they are still in beta as they are still working on translating the entirety of ActionScript 2 into Ruffle. As a plus for Ruffle, Ruffle is a lot more optimized than Flash, mitigating a lot of the performance issues found in particle-heavy games.
- An app called Flash Patcher allows you to remove the time bomb on Flash Player, combined with Waterfox [before version 4/Pale Moon, one of the few regularly updated browsers that still supports Flash, and you can now play any Flash game in 2021. The same method is also possible through the China version of Flash Player (see below), without the usage of Flash Patcher.
- There are few browsers like Basilisk and Puffin retained support for Flash.
- Another way to get rid of the time bomb is to download older versions of Flash Player from The Internet Archive. or use the Clean Flash Player (which was based on the China version of Flash Player, but much safer as it doesn't contain spyware, almost the latest version, and has no timebomb).