Short answers, pulled from the story.
Adobe Flash was deprecated in July 2017 and officially discontinued on the 31st of December 2020, primarily due to security vulnerabilities. Flash Player had accumulated over 1,078 CVE security entries, more than 842 of which could lead to arbitrary code execution. Steve Jobs' 2010 open letter criticizing Flash's closed nature and security flaws accelerated its decline, and by January 2021 all major browsers were blocking Flash content unconditionally.
Adobe Flash originated as SmartSketch, a vector drawing application published by FutureWave Software in 1993. In 1995, FutureWave added animation features and released it as FutureSplash Animator. Macromedia acquired the product in December 1996 and rebranded it as Macromedia Flash 1.0. The name Flash was created by blending the words Future and Splash.
FutureWave Software was founded by Charlie Jackson, Jonathan Gay, and Michelle Alsip-Welsh. The company developed SmartSketch in 1993 and later created FutureSplash Animator, which became the basis for Macromedia Flash after Macromedia acquired FutureWave in December 1996.
Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia on the 3rd of December 2005. The acquisition included the full Macromedia product line: Flash, Dreamweaver, Director, Fireworks, and Authorware. Adobe released its first Flash version under its own brand, Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, in 2007.
By October 2023, the Flashpoint Archive had collected more than 160,000 Flash applications, excluding commercial products, and offered them as a freely available download. The Internet Archive separately integrated the Ruffle Flash emulator into its system in November 2020, one month before Flash's official end-of-life date.
HTML5 replaced Adobe Flash as the standard for interactive and video web content. YouTube switched to HTML5 by default in January 2015. Adobe itself renamed Flash Professional to Adobe Animate in 2016 to reflect its shift toward HTML5 authoring. Google released a tool called Swiffy in 2015 to automatically convert Flash animations to HTML5, though it was discontinued in 2016.