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It has already been an auspicious week for the announced death of personal computing staples. First, Microsoft announced that they’re killing off MS Paint to the chagrin of Deviantart users with no artistic talent whatsoever… and Ringo Starr. And now, Adobe is finally taking steps to give Flash the axe… well, Flash Player, at the very least.
Chef Alamode, 2005
Microsoft Paint, Giclee print
17″ x 21″
$2,400 (out of stock)
The decision is nearly a decade in the making. Flash Player is riddled with security issues. It’s a power hog, which is especially bad for mobile devices, since they’re about the level of a laptop from 10 years ago jammed into a Pop Tart. And, worst of all, Flash was used to animate Ember’s Ghost Squad. Fuck you, Randy Stair; everything you made was shit, and so were you.
One does wonder what it will mean for sites fundamentally built on Flash as a medium, though. Supposedly, owners of such content will have a way to migrate it to the new hotness, HTML5. That said, this is a 3-year plan to phase the program out. They’ll have time (’til the end of 2020, in fact.).
Oh, and the animation program has already been renamed from “Flash Professional” to “Adobe Animate“. So it’s not just an end of life for the player, but the brand itself.
Adobe has already gotten all of the major companies on board: Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook. And given the slow phasing out, it’s not so much an execution. Flash made many endeavors possible, and they plan around keeping them; it would be disingenuous to consign what can be saved to the junk heap. After all, Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fade Away.
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