Adobe Flash

About

Adobe Flash is a development platform for various types multimedia and software, including animations, browser games, web applications and mobile games. Flash is supported on a several different web browsers for the Microsoft Windows, Mac OS C and Linux operating systems, but was replaced by HTML 5 for use on smart phone mobile devices.

History

In 1993, the California-based software development company FutureWave Software^[1] was founded, which released the drawing program SmartSketch as their first product. Shortly after, the program was redesigned as the FutureSplash Animator vector animation tool (shown below).

In December 1996, the software company Macromedia purchased FutureSplash, renaming the product to Adobe Flash and releasing it as both an editor and player. The new version was widely adopted on the web by video game and animation creators following the release of a free browser plugin.

HTML 5

In January 2008, the core technology Internet markup language HTML 5 was released, which included several features similar to Adobe Flash, including audio and video playback and Scalable Vector Graphics. Unlike Flash, HTML 5 requires the use of CSS3 and Javascript to run animations and interactive elements. In January 2015, YouTube replaced Flash with HTML 5 as their default video player.

Highlights

Newgrounds

In 1995, the first version of the site Newgrounds was launched, which has been cited as the web’s oldest Flash animation portal user-generated community. The site was scarcely updated until after the Macromedia acquisition of Flash in 1996.

YTMND

In March 2006, YTMND switched to a Flash preloader^[6] for user-submitted pages in order to fix a bug requiring a page refresh to match background sound with animations.

YouTube Tutorials

Many YouTubers have created video tutorials on creating games and animations using Adobe Flash. As of July 2015, there are over 293,000 search results for the query “adobe flash tutorial.”^[7]

Reception

Flash has been criticized for its poor performance in resource management, frequent requirement of software updates and a variety of security vulnerabilities.

Update Requirements

Adobe Flash has gained much notoriety for its frequent release of software updates, which may cause inexplicable crashes or malfunctions for the users if neglected.

Browser Incompatibilities

As major web browsers and video-hosting platforms began to phase out their support of Adobe Flash for HTML5, many users have complained about experiencing sudden crashes during the playback of a media file.

Security Vulnerabilities

In 2011, the Mac Security company Intego^[5] released a “Year in Mac Security” report, which noted that a trojan virus masquerading as a Flash Player installer had infected Mac OS X users. In early July 2015, several new security vulnerabilities were discovered in Flash, including a hack that allowed cyber criminals to attack a remote target’s machine with malicious code.^[2] On July 12th, Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos^[3]^[4] posted tweets calling for Adobe to announce an “end-of-life date for Flash,” following the security complaints about the software platform (shown below). On the following day, the software company Mozilla disabled Flash by default in their Firefox web browsers.