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It’s the end of an era. Next month, Adobe will discontinue all support for its Shockwave multimedia platform. And with it go a bunch of old site animations, flash videos, and shitty, shitty browser games.
Adobe broke the news to Enterprise customers last month by email. And the rest of us get it via a notice on their website:
Effective April 9, 2019, Adobe Shockwave will be discontinued and the Shockwave player for Windows will no longer be available for download.
Companies with existing Enterprise licenses for Adobe Shockwave continue to receive support until the end of their current contracts.
Adobe Shockwave is a browser-based multimedia platform for interactive applications and video games. Retiring the Shockwave player for Windows is the last step in a multi-year process: Adobe Director, an authoring tool for Shockwave content, was discontinued on February 1, 2017 and the Shockwave player for macOS was discontinued on March 1, 2017.
Adobe continues to offer a rich set of content creation tools through Creative Cloud, including Adobe Animate for authoring interactive content for multiple platforms, such HTML5 Canvas, WebGL, Flash/Adobe AIR, and others.
The rise of, honestly, better options such as HTML 5 Canvas and WebGL are the reason Adobe is ending Shockwave. In the wake of this decision, places like The Internet Archive are doing all they can to preserve as much as possible in regards to Shockwave. But this truly is the end of an internet era; the heady days of Shockwave’s youth are long behind it. And, more importantly, it’s considered something of a massive security liability nowadays.
As such, it’s actually recommended that you uninstall Shockwave now, or whenever you feel like it. Despite that, Adobe plans on honoring Enterprise licensees through 2022; presumably, when the last of those contracts end.
Source: Gizmodo
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