ljoWtd8riiīut web standards don’t stay still forever.

Many of my fondest memories from childhood are of Flash games and animations. I didn't own consoles growing up, so Flash is how I learned to love games. On December 31st, Adobe Flash will no longer be supported. The earliest on-demand video services like Hulu and BBC iPlayer all required Flash in the early 2000s. At one point in time, Flash was even required to use websites like YouTube, Vimeo, Google Video, and more. The FLV container made it possible to display video in virtually any web browser provided you had Flash player installed. Comedy web series like Homestar Runner, stickman animations like Xiao Xiao, and rudimentary yet addictive games like Pandemic all flourished on the platform.īut Flash also played a huge part in the adoption of streaming video. Websites like Newgrounds sprung up as a hub for all things Flash. Adobe took Flash under its wing and developed many more features in the years to come.įlash gave life to some of the internet’s most beloved websites, cartoons, games, and more. In 2005, Macromedia was acquired by Adobe Systems (the same company that turned down an offer to buy FutureSplash in 1995). In 2000, Flash 5 was released with ActionScript, a rudimentary scripting language that closely mimics JavaScript. Macromedia added more bells and whistles to Flash over time. It was even used to make entire websites that looked great for the time, were fast to load, and responsive to use. Flash enabled creators, marketers, and anyone with an eye for new media to create games, animations, banner adverts, interactive menus. They scale infinitely since they have no defined size, unlike raster graphics which have much larger file sizes and will pixellate when stretched. Vector graphics are essentially text-based instructions. RELATED: What's the Difference Between Pixels and Vectors?

This was important at a time when many people were using dial-up internet with slow download speeds. Since Flash used vector-based graphics, file sizes for the resulting animations were tiny. By the mid-2000s, Flash had taken off in a big way, spurred on by the popularity of browser games, animations, and interactive tools that relied on it.įlash was able to rise to prominence thanks to the simplicity of installing a small plugin that was compatible with most browsers. Macromedia rebranded the tool as Macromedia Flash 1.0 and released it alongside a counterpart browser plugin called Macromedia Flash Player.

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