It’s a deadline that’s been looming for the best part of three years, but now there’s no avoiding it. As the end of 2020 draws nearer, so too does the end-of-life date for Adobe Flash Player, the browser plugin that was once the king of the Internet.
If you said back in 2005 that Flash Player was on the way out, nobody would have believed you. Back then it was virtually impossible to view the Internet without it: everything from games, online chatrooms, videos to entire websites depended on it. Its ubiquity was such that Adobe—who that same year bought over its developers Macromedia for $3bn—claimed it was installed on “98 per cent of Internet-connected desktops.” And it’s no wonder, considering it provided the basic foundations for what was fast becoming one of the world’s most visited websites: YouTube.
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Before the creation of Internet plugins like Flash Player, it was nearly impossible to view anything but simple text on the Internet. If you wanted to view a video online, for example, you needed to download it as a file, meaning you had to take things off the Internet to view whatever was on it. Then of course were the other headaches: if your computer did not have a compatible media player like QuickTime installed, or if the file was too big, and so on. The job of Internet plugins—like Flash, but also Shockwave and Java—was to enable your browser to handle “multimedia experiences” directly, such as video or audio, without the need to download anything else.
Flash’s arrival in the mid-1990s was different from other plugins, in that the plugin was only one half of a “two-part” system: the other was a desktop software package that could create animations and interactive media. The program exported files using its own format—SWF—specifically designed to be read by Flash Player. In other words, it was Flash the program that allowed people to create videos, animations, even whole websites. It was Flash the plugin that allowed them to be viewed and shared online. With the added fact that Flash Player was free for anyone to download, and compatible across operating systems, a seamless link was made between how somebody might create something and how their audience might get to view it. By doing so, and so easily, you could say it was Flash that allowed things on the Internet to “go viral” in the first place.
The relative ease of use of Flash’s software also meant the scope of who could create that viral media was huge, ushering in what you might call the Internet’s first “folk art.” In those days, everyone was an amateur. The weird and wonderful by small, independent creators could sit alongside the big wigs without much discernible difference. Any notion about how things ought to look or function was completely moot. Do you want your website to play your favourite song on repeat? You do it! Do you want to use a gaudy colour palette? You go for it! Do you want a webpage solely composed of an animation of squatting badgers on a continuous loop? Nobody’s stopping you! It was a time of play and seeing what worked. Sometimes the result could be horrifying, like David Firth’s Salad Fingers. Or it could grow into a popular web series with spinoff boardgames, like Homestar Runner. Other online communities, like Newgrounds and Albino Black Sheep, were set up purely for sharing games and animations made in Flash. By the mid-2000s, Flash had become the Internet’s common language, the standard by which everyone communicated—but what you could say with it was anything but standard.
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If Flash’s rise was swift, its demise has been drawn out and piecemeal. It started in 2010, when Apple made the surprise announcement that it was dropping support for Flash Player content from Safari for iPhone. Flash, Steve Jobs said, was “no longer necessary” for browsing the web on the iPhone. From then on, Flash was shouldered out from the next big leap in the Internet’s “revolution” on mobile and tablet. As browsers came to improve their own integrated standards for multimedia content without the need of external plugins, Flash came to suffer something of the pioneer’s fate, unable to keep up within the very realm it played such a key part in establishing—not to mention its constant bug patches.
Citing security concerns, in 2015 Google chose to block certain elements of Flash Player content on Chrome; a year after that they announced an outright ban on Flash-based advertising, which at the time still accounted for 84 per cent of all online banner ads. It was six months after the ban came into force, in July 2017, that Adobe announced their own intentions to wind down all support for Flash for good by the end of 2020.
With the end having been in our sights for so long—and the multimedia dimension of the Internet now a given—is there anyone left who is really mourning Flash’s demise? As a mere plugin perhaps not. That in its final years it became more synonymous with malware-ridden advertising banners than experimental video-making says a lot about how our relationship to the Internet has changed.
As start-ups of the early 2000s have become some of the world’s most influential corporations, a professional veneer has been smoothed over the once rough surface of the web—but perhaps at the expense of something more spontaneous. We might be grateful that nobody’s website plays music by default anymore. But can we recall with any honesty the last time we stumbled across a website that took us by surprise, and that did not already look like the last five we visited? That’s, of course, if we are even so inclined to “stumble upon” anything to begin with. As experimentation gave way to tried and tested formulas, the big winners have now acquired a near monopoly on our time. Amazon caters to our needs. Facebook wants you to connect with the “people who matter.” YouTube today is better at recommending what we want or expect. But where should I go if I want to see something that I don’t expect?
Part of the change also comes from us, the users of the web. In the process of entangling our lives with the Internet—the trails of personal history on social media, cloud networks and embarrassing teenage blogs now spanning one, if not two, decades—we have made it a more self-conscious place. As online personas have given way to our real identities, are we perhaps more hesitant about what we put online in the first place? As the place we work as much as we spend our spare time on, is there a risk that we have begun to swap out wild experimentation for professional coherence? Or put it this way: would anyone ever create a website like Brendan Fraser’s ever again? In truth it’s probably too early to say. As with Flash Player, it’ll take another end-of-an-era milestone before we can figure out the trajectory that we ended up taking.
It is some consolation, however, that there will always be communities of people looking to eke out a space to share their work online, no matter how it is made, and no matter what shape the web itself takes in the coming decades. Perhaps it will continue to flourish on YouTube—like 2017’s disquieting Petscop would suggest—or someplace else we haven’t conceived of yet. The end of Flash certainly does not spell the end of the weird and wonderful. But for the time being, it might be just that little bit harder to come by.
