Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/31/rip-adobe-flash.html
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Alas…Homestar says goodbye…
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To be fair, the Brothers Chaps have faced reality and reposted their Flash animations as Youtube videos. We’ll still lose out on the games, which they jokingly bring attention to by recently updating Stinkoman after not touching it for a decade.
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Searching for easter eggs was half the fun of HR
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Flash has been a security problem for years, I have abandoned it many moons ago, I’m shocked there are still sites using it.
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Fuck Flash - and I mean that in the kindest way possible. I believe that I speak for many IT professionals who have had to clean up after it. Good riddance.
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For better or worse, Flash will live on in other forms. It’s commonly used in console game engines for the animated user interface. It doesn’t use Adobe’s engine in this format (that would cost too much), but there are products like ScaleForm that reverse-engineered Flash’s engine so you can build animations and interfaces in Adobe’s tools and then use them in the game engine. I worked on two different console games that used ScaleForm to great success. It removes the engineer from the loop on the UI Art team and lets them go hog wild with swoopy effects and twinkles.
I’ve been out of the industry for a while, however with Flash going away, products like ScaleForm probably evolved their engines and built their own tool chains. Nevertheless, the core of the Flash engine will always be in there, haunting us from beyond the grave.
Good riddance, Flash, you security and performance nightmare.
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Really? I’ll check Alta Vista using my Netscape browser over dial up AOL.
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its decline came as a result of chronic security issues, poor performance on smartphones, and improvements in native web technologies such as Javascript and CSS.
Those improvements lagged Flash’s decline, they weren’t a cause of it. They were promised as “right around the corner” as Flash fell out of favor, but it took 5-10 years before they really arrived.
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Man, I’ll really miss some flash games. There’s too many to count out there, but some were actually good.
Then again, flash has been blocked on all my browsers for a few years now, so I kinda already got used to living without it 
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It’s like, if you are on a runaway train whose chemical toilets are explosively backfiring as it hurtles towards a ravine full of scorpions and is on fire, you might happen to spot an interesting new restaurant out of the window, but that doesn’t mean it will be a tragedy when the train reaches the end of the line.
But anyway, what I came here to say is that the headline should have been:
Flash Flushed
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First thing I thought of too, but the Brothers Chaps have moved on to bigger and better things (much like the internet itself). I’ll miss the HSR games and clicking around the Strongbad emails for easter eggs.
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No, don’t Rest In Peace… Burn In Hell!
As much as flash was useful for animation, I do not miss how every hip website decided to create its own interface for how to navigate the web. Where were the controls for the next page? Who knows. The hippest states started out with a useless splash page with no visible navigation of any kind. Getting around was like playing a game of Myst.
I also really do not miss the various attempts to make navigating websites based on 3D approximations of an actual location. I don’t want to have to navigate in 3D to actual physical little rooms to do different things. It’s not a useful or efficient metaphor. It’s just a big pain in the butt.
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It’s OK, I’ve already replaced all my Flash content with Java embeds.
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When I started my current job, they replaced their Java timesheets applet with a Flash site. This was two years ago.
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I am not looking forward to the period in the next few days to month or so where the users with obscure flash dependencies that nobody knew about start popping out of the woodwork and freaking out.
I don’t know who it will be yet; but it will be someone.
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ADP by any chance?
I wouldn’t doubt that they have competitors at least as bad; but that timing lines up pretty well with when that particular outfit boldly upgraded from the Java interface that required a JRE so old that it still had Sun Microsystems branding to a cutting-edge Flash interface.
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