FLASH PLAYER: GOODBYE TO THE HISTORIC ADOBE PROGRAM

Another piece of the internet from the past is gone. In fact, 2020 marked the end of Flash Player , the Adobe program that everyone, at least once, had to deal with.

With a choice already foreseen for some time, the final tombstone was placed on a program that allowed us to see videos or multimedia content on the net but which, for years, was the center of criticism and bitter controversy that led it slowly. to be marketingmediaweb   less and less used and more and more outdated. Adobe is pushing all users to uninstall the software from their devices: on January 12, all flash content on the network will be permanently deleted .  futuretechexpert

Tomb stone

In recent weeks, many have received the warning message that marked the definitive end of Flash Player. Adobe clearly explained that they had discontinued the program and invited, with a few clicks, to permanently uninstall it from their devices. A radical choice, even divinebeautytips    surprising for many, and a small blow to the heart for all internet nostalgics. For better or for worse, Flash Player had been an integral part of the network for about 24 years . For a long time it was the most used program for playing video and multimedia content on the web.

The most modern and interactive sites of the first period nanobiztech   of the internet used Adobe software to work at their best: it was mandatory to have it installed to view certain contents and in the early 2000s everyone had a version of it on their computer. Time has not been very friendly to Flash Player , which slowly ended up at the edge of the scene and was soon overtaken by much safer and more efficient languages and methods. There was no lack of criticism and the decision to close everything, which had been planned for some time, was inevitable.

A long life

The history of Flash Player begins in 1993 with the techcrunchblog   publication of FutureWave, the first precursor of the program, then purchased in 1996 by Macromedia. Thus was born Macromedia Flash , for many years the only possible way to play any multimedia content on the web. In 2005 the historic passage of Flash to Adobe arrived, which over time has released various updates and also numerous versions. Its most famous extension was certainly the player, a program that allowed you to view and use content.

Flash was certainly a useful software but in its own globalmarketingbusiness   way controversial, often criticized for the flaws in it and for its use of energy: it was heavy and slow but for a long time it remained the only one capable of giving the web a "modern" look and keeping up with the times. Without Flash, no site would have been able to show videos or create multimedia and interactive contents. All sites that made extensive use of graphics used it, all operating systems had it pre-installed, all the language and aesthetics of the internet passed through Flash.

A controversial life

As Flash grew, criticism also multiplied. A very useful program but full of problems , as fundamental and necessary to make the internet work as it is problematic from the point of view of security and performance. It was chock full of vulnerabilities and flaws within its code that could be exploited by hackers for their cyber attacks. Despite its undeniable and fundamental usefulness, it was even advised against installing it: the flaws were so many that they were often unknown and impossible to predict, making the program a rather fertile ground for hackers of all kinds.

Not only were we dealing with an unsafe product but also expensive for the machines in which it was installed.Content written in Flash was quite heavy , took a long time to load, wasted massive resources on computers, and caused laptops to download rather quickly. Two problems of no small importance for such an important product which, however, would have been largely overcome very soon.

A no holds barred battle

The begin of the end came in 2008, with the release of Apple's first iPhone. Steve Jobs became the champion of the fight against Flash Player and was the first to strongly and publicly challenge the program so much that he decided not to allow the installation and display of Flash content on his first portable device. The entire scaffolding of iOS and its Safari browser would never have contemplated Flash: all the mobile devices of the apple would have done without it forever.

The choice, strongly contested, has imposed itself on the rest of the world, definitively cutting the legs of Adobe and its ambitions. It was understood that they could do without the entire scaffolding on which the web had been based until then:multimedia could be lighter and pass through simpler and safer languages . From that moment a real battle began between Apple and Adobe, a no holds barred confrontation where Flash was the designated sacrificial victim.

The slow end of an era

The clash was so bitter and Apple's choice so radical that Steve Jobs published an open letter to the world in which he explained the reasons that had led him to exclude Flash from his portable devices. The founder of the Cupertino company had made it a matter of safety and performance, Flash made iPhones less secure and reduced autonomy, not to mention that it was out of Apple's own control. Jobs criticized Adobe's closed system and the complete control it had over the content that passed through its Player, a control that Apple wanted to keep and have for itself instead.

Apple and Jobs had done their math very well: the second decade of the 2000s was a pretty fertile time for change.. New languages were in full development and allowed to do the same things as Flash - or even more - with greater programming freedom and much less resource expenditure.

The main internet services, from YouTube to Netflix, passing through Facebook, had abandoned Flash to embrace better and far more efficient technologies. The web had begun to understand very well that the program was no longer as basic as one might think .

Goodbye Flash

Jobs's letter and network choices took about two years to make Adobe understand that his product's dominance was coming to an end. 2012 marked the definitive victory of Apple, with the choice of Adobe to no longer make its Player available on portable devices. 2017 has instead sanctioned the definitive awareness, with Adobe recognizing its creation as obsolete and deciding to dispose of everything in the following 3 years.

In 2020, the company placed the definitive tombstone on its creature, which has long since been eliminated from almost all browsers for browsing the internet. The latest version of Safari no longer allows you to see Flash content, Chrome has deleted it, Firefox disabled. Microsoft has released an update that deletes the program from all its operating systems, and Adobe itself has sent messages to users to permanently uninstall the program.

And now?

All good what ends well? For the security and modernity of the internet and its systems, certainly, thanks to the birth of much more modern and performing programs and languages. Unfortunately, the historical memory of the internet will be penalized : if such an important program ceases to exist and is no longer supported, there is a risk that many of the sites, contents or videos that worked via Flash disappear from circulation, risking to eliminate real historical artifacts from the web.

There is talk of important pages, historical video games, entire digital archives - such as those of the Italian newspaper La Stampa - entire pages of more than 20 or 30 years that risk not being able to be consulted anymore. A risk that we are trying to overcome through reconversion and transformation works.

The Internet Archive , an American non-profit organization, has for some time set itself the goal of preserving the culture of the web for posterity: if it initially did so by converting physical documents into digital, for some time now it has been converting old web finds into language modern: this is what is happening with some video games, pages or animations that worked only through Flash and that will be slowly reconverted to be usable also in the future .

This is the other side of the coin of great technological progress, as beautiful and useful as it is capable of eating its own past in one bite, a historical memory that cannot and must not be erased, because it has told, tells and will tell everything. what the great internet age says about us. Flash is finished, but what he helped create must not and cannot be forgotten.