Adobe has finally said goodbye to Flash, the software platform that ran games, apps and ads in your browser while also draining your laptop's battery.
How come Flash doesn't get bored while running?
The good news for Flash lovers is that you can still tax your computer and drain its battery by simply installing Google’s Chrome browser. For Flash haters, the decline has been going on for so long (it started with the iPhone in 2007) that it seems rude to celebrate at this point. Flash was officially abandoned by Adobe in 2015, and it went under on December 31, 2020. But why did it take so long? Was there anything good about it? If you were a developer, yes.
"At first I hated it," Flash developer Gerrit Dijkstra told Lifewire via direct message. "Then [Adobe] bought Macromedia and they added scripting to Flash. This ActionScript was so minimal, but as I heard Peter Gabriel say in a documentary yesterday, 'creative people are cunning, they tell them what they can't do and they find a way to do it anyway.'"
In practical terms, Flash was a software platform that allowed developers to write programs that would run in a browser plugin. This meant that as long as you installed the Flash plugin, you could run any of those apps. It didn’t matter whether you were using Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome. Today, unless your business uses proprietary software based on Chrome, you’re unlikely to encounter any browser incompatibilities. For example, your banking website might not work well in Safari. But back then, Flash was a way to ensure that the experience was the same everywhere.
