Adobe Flash is dead, long live Adobe Flash.
Late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs famously penned a public letter about Adobe Flash back in 2010. Jobs wasn’t the first person to dislike Flash. In fact, developers had hated the technology for years because of its volatility and instability. But Jobs made their plight public and the Internet is now a better place because of it. Once in the public eye, Adobe had no choice but to devote time and resources to making Flash a better product, and the Flash experience of 2015 is nowhere near as bad as it was five years ago.
Of course, Flash still has issues with stability and security that make promoting and growing the technology difficult. In fact, a recently discovered vulnerability in Flash was so bad that the only way to fix it was to completely uninstall Flash Player.
And so Adobe has finally decided to kill Flash… sort of.
DON’T MISS: 10 best Cyber Week sales you can shop right now
“For nearly two decades, Flash Professional has been the standard for producing rich animations on the web,” Adobe said in a blog post this week. “Because of the emergence of HTML5 and demand for animations that leverage web standards, we completely rewrote the tool over the past few years to incorporate native HTML5 Canvas and WebGL support. To more accurately represent its position as the premier animation tool for the web and beyond, Flash Professional will be renamed Adobe Animate CC, starting with the next release in early 2016.”
It might be long overdue, but it finally happened: the Flash brand is no more.
“Adobe Animate” will replace Flash beginning with the next major release in the coming months, and Adobe will then begin the long and painful process of trying to make the world forget “Flash” ever existed. The company is already off to a good start as it continues to harp on the fact that it has embraced HTML5, the web tech that Jobs fought for so vehemently back in 2010.
“Today, over a third of all content created in Flash Professional today uses HTML5, reaching over one billion devices worldwide,” Adobe said. “It has also been recognized as an HTML5 ad solution that complies with the latest Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standards, and is widely used in the cartoon industry by powerhouse studios like Nickelodeon and Titmouse Inc.”
The company is of course still being careful to let the world know that legacy Flash support is not going to vanish overnight. Flash and AIR formats will continue to be supported as “first-class citizens,” according to the company, and end-user PCs will continue to support the current crop of Flash content.
