New Year's Eve, and Flash Finally Flatlines
Adobe officially ends support for Flash Player today, closing out decades as the web's default plugin for video, games, and animation.
Today’s the day. Adobe is officially ending support for Flash Player, and it couldn’t have picked a more fitting date — the last few hours of a year that already felt like an ending for a dozen other things. Flash isn’t going out with a bang. It’s going out the way most long-declining software does: quietly, on a date nobody but the people who set it even remembers.
If you’re under 30, it’s worth pausing on what Flash actually was. For the better part of two decades it was the thing that made the web move. Before HTML5 video, before CSS animations, before browsers could do much of anything beyond render static pages, Flash was how you watched a video, played a browser game, or sat through an unskippable animated intro on some company’s homepage. Newgrounds, early YouTube, Homestar Runner, a thousand Flash-based ad units that ate your CPU — all of it ran on the same plugin, published by Macromedia and then Adobe after the 2005 acquisition.
The decline has been slow and well-telegraphed. Steve Jobs’ 2010 “Thoughts on Flash” letter is the moment people point to as the beginning of the end, when Apple refused to bring the plugin to iOS and effectively forced the industry toward open web standards instead. It took a full decade to actually finish the job. Chrome and Firefox have been blocking Flash content by default for a while now — Firefox 84, which shipped just over two weeks ago, was the last release to support it at all. After today, there’s no version of any major browser that will run it, plugin installed or not.
Adobe’s timeline has been public since 2017, so nobody in the industry is caught off guard. The bigger question heading into January is what happens to the pile of old Flash-dependent content that never got migrated — museum exhibits, government portals, internal enterprise tools, educational software that some school district bought once and never touched again. A lot of that is just going dark today, and there’s no guarantee anyone goes back to rebuild it in HTML5 or Unity.
In a smaller, almost funny coincidence, Google is also shutting down Google Cloud Print today, ending a service most people forgot existed. It’s not related to Flash technically, but it fits the theme: December 31, 2020 is turning into a genuine changing-of-the-guard for software that quietly ran in the background of the internet for years.
Fitting way to close out 2020, honestly. See you in the new year.