Adobe Flash

• 1. Introduction

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  Adobe Flash once lived inside nearly every computer on Earth. By 2005, more machines worldwide had Flash Player installed than any other web media format, outpacing Java, QuickTime, RealMedia, and Windows Media combined. It powered animated websites, browser games, and the early years of YouTube. Then, in a single open letter written by Steve Jobs in 2010, the countdown to its death began in earnest. How did a drawing tool for pen-based computers become the backbone of the early web? And why did something so ubiquitous fall so completely?

• 2. From Pen to Pixel

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  SmartSketch was born in 1993, the product of a small company called FutureWave Software, founded by Charlie Jackson, Jonathan Gay, and Michelle Alsip-Welsh. It was a vector drawing application built for pen computers running the PenPoint OS. When PenPoint failed in the marketplace, the team ported SmartSketch to Windows and Mac OS rather than give up.

  FutureWave then spotted something bigger on the horizon. As the internet gained momentum, the team recognized the potential for a vector-based animation tool that could challenge Macromedia's Shockwave technology. In 1995, they reworked SmartSketch with frame-by-frame animation and released it as FutureSplash Animator.

  Early adopters were not small players. Microsoft wanted FutureSplash animated content at the center of its planned MSN 2.0 online TV network. Disney Online used FutureSplash animations for their subscription service Disney's Daily Blast. Fox Broadcasting Company launched The Simpsons online using FutureSplash. Despite these high-profile wins, FutureWave tried to sell the product to Adobe Systems in 1995. Adobe turned them down. Macromedia did not make the same mistake: in December 1996, Macromedia acquired FutureSplash and rebranded it as Macromedia Flash 1.0, giving it the name that blended the words Future and Splash.

• 3. Building the Platform

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  Macromedia distributed Flash Player as a free browser plugin, a deliberate strategy to gain market share fast. Between 1996 and 1999, the company steadily upgraded Flash, adding MovieClips, Alpha transparency, and the foundational scripting system called Actions. The real leap came in 2000 with Flash 5, which introduced ActionScript 1.0, a language based on ECMAScript and closely related to JavaScript in syntax. For the first time, developers could write real programs inside Flash, not just animations.

  ActionScript 2.0 arrived with Flash MX 2004 in 2003, adding object-oriented programming. The last version released under Macromedia's name, Flash 8 in 2005, focused on graphical filters such as blur and drop shadow, blend modes borrowed from Photoshop's vocabulary, and support for the On2 VP6 video codec.

  On the 3rd of December 2005, Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia and took over the entire product line, including Flash, Dreamweaver, Director, Fireworks, and Authorware. Adobe's first release under its own brand was Flash CS3 Professional in 2007, which introduced ActionScript 3.0, a language capable of supporting serious enterprise application development. Adobe Flex Builder, built on the Eclipse platform, targeted that market alongside it.

• 4. The Web's Entertainment Layer

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  In the early 2000s, Flash became the creative layer on top of the web. Between 2000 and 2010, major companies including Nike, HBO, Disney, General Electric, Cartoon Network, and Nokia built Flash-based websites to launch products and create interactive portals. After Adobe introduced Stage3D with Flash Player 11 in 2011, a wave of hardware-accelerated 3D content appeared on websites, powering product demonstrations and virtual tours.

  YouTube, founded in 2005 by former PayPal employees, used Adobe Flash Player from the start as its video delivery mechanism. Between 2006 and 2016, Speedtest.net conducted over nine billion speed tests using a utility built entirely on Adobe Flash. These were not novelty uses. Flash was infrastructure.

  Flash video games formed their own ecosystem. Portals like Newgrounds, Kongregate, and Armor Games became dedicated homes for browser games, many built by individuals or small groups because the software was simple enough to learn without formal training. Popular games from this era include Farmville, Alien Hominid, QWOP, Club Penguin, and Dofus. Scaleform GFx, a commercial Flash player, extended Flash into large-budget 3D games, providing HUDs and interfaces for more than 150 major video game titles across more than ten major engines, including Unreal Engine 3 and CryEngine, since its launch in 2003.

• 5. The Open Letter

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  Flash's decline has a precise originating document: Thoughts on Flash, an open letter written by Steve Jobs and published in 2010. Jobs argued that Flash was a closed platform with deep security flaws, and announced that Apple would not allow it on the iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. Flash cookies alone illustrated some of the concern. A study conducted at UC Berkeley in August 2009 found that 50% of websites using Flash were also deploying Flash cookies, which stored data outside the reach of browsers' normal cache-clearing tools, often without disclosure in privacy policies.

  Jobs' letter did immediate damage. Flash CS5 had launched with the ability to compile iPhone applications, but on the 8th of April 2010, Apple changed its Developer License terms to effectively ban Flash-to-iPhone compilation. Adobe announced on the 20th of April 2010, that it would make no further investments in targeting iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5. The mobile front had closed.

  Adobe ended support for Flash on Android in 2011. In July 2015, Facebook's chief security officer Alex Stamos publicly called on Adobe to discontinue Flash entirely, and Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari all moved to blacklist earlier versions of Flash Player. Adobe Flash Player had by that point accumulated over 1,078 CVE security entries, more than 842 of which could lead to arbitrary code execution.

• 6. The Long Shutdown

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  Adobe deprecated Flash formally in July 2017, announcing an end-of-life date of the 31st of December 2020. The shutdown was built directly into the software. Excluding the China-specific variant of Flash, the player contained a hard kill switch that prevented it from running any Flash content after the 12th of January 2021.

  Major browsers moved in step. By January 2021, every major browser was blocking Flash content unconditionally. Microsoft released an optional Windows update in January 2021, designated KB4577586, to remove Flash Player from Windows entirely. By July 2021, that update was pushed out automatically as a security patch to all remaining systems.

  After 2020, Adobe designated Harman as the official enterprise distributor of Flash Player for commercial customers. In mainland China, a separate version of Flash Player continued to be distributed by Zhongcheng Network Technology through Flash.cn. The authoring tool, meanwhile, had already been renamed Adobe Animate in 2016, redirecting its identity toward HTML5 content.

  In November 2020, one month before the EOL date, the Internet Archive integrated Ruffle, a Flash emulator written in Rust, into its emulation system. Ruffle runs in web browsers by compiling down to WebAssembly. By October 2023, the Flashpoint Archive had independently collected more than 160,000 Flash applications, excluding commercial products, offering them as a freely downloadable archive. Kongregate, one of the largest Flash game portals, began working with the Strong Museum of Play to preserve its catalog.

• 7. What Flash Left Behind

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  Flash's ActionScript language did not vanish without a trace. In 2006, Adobe donated the ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 to the Mozilla Foundation as open source, beginning work on the Tamarin virtual machine. In 2011, the Adobe Flex Framework was donated to the Apache Software Foundation and rebranded Apache Flex. Adobe signaled the shift explicitly: sources from Apache quoted at the time noted that enterprise application development was no longer a focus at Adobe, and that Flash's remaining energy was directed toward games and video.

  The scale of what Flash had enabled remained striking even in retrospect. Adobe AIR, the desktop and mobile runtime that emerged from Flash, was reported in May 2014 to have been used in over 100,000 unique applications and to have logged over one billion installations worldwide. Adobe AIR won the Best Mobile Application Development award at the Consumer Electronics Show in both 2014 and 2015.

  The Brothers Chaps, creators of the Homestar Runner cartoon series, built one of the most-visited Flash applications on the web. Colin Moock, an ActionScript expert and author, became one of the defining educators of the platform. Their work, and the work of hundreds of thousands of developers and animators, now lives primarily in archives. Papers, Please, a BAFTA-award-winning game, was developed using OpenFL, the open-source implementation of the Flash API that continues to target platforms from iOS to PlayStation to Nintendo Switch.