A year and a half ago I said goodbye to Flash once already. That was when Adobe renamed Flash Professional CC to Animate CC, and Flash the authoring tool came to an end.
Today the Chromium blog post So long, and thanks for all the Flash pointed me to Adobe's own announcement, Flash & The Future of Interactive Content: Adobe will stop updating and distributing Flash Player by the end of 2020. This time it's Flash the platform that's ending.
Plenty of people see Flash and HTML5 as nothing but rivals, so the thing to do is cheer for HTML5 and the open web and curse Flash on its way out. What most of them have forgotten, or never knew, is this: a good part of HTML5 (strictly, the Web APIs that the marketing term covers) exists because the Flash platform and its community fed it into web standards.
As Flash & The Future of Interactive Content puts it:
Adobe has long played a leadership role in advancing interactivity and creative content – from video, to games and more – on the web. Where we've seen a need to push content and interactivity forward, we've innovated to meet those needs. Where a format didn't exist, we invented one – such as with Flash and Shockwave. And over time, as the web evolved, these new formats were adopted by the community, in some cases formed the basis for open standards, and became an essential part of the web.
Companies and users wanted the web to carry rich, interactive content like video and games, and the web couldn't do that yet. So someone gave it a new format that could. That format was Flash Player, and that's why a proprietary platform shipped as a browser plugin could be the de facto web standard for a while.
Fast forward to today. Once the market and the community had proven those capabilities worth having, they were taken from Flash, refined, and turned into real open standards: HTML5 video, audio and canvas, and WebGL. The proprietary platforms that pioneered them were stopgaps and shims all along, and little by little nobody needed them anymore.
That isn't failure. They did the job they came to do, and now they get to retire with honors.
ActionScript 3.0, Flash's language and the only implementation of ES4, pushed ECMAScript forward and left a deep mark on modern JavaScript;
Adobe Flex, the enterprise framework for Flash: when @徐飞 and I talked about it earlier this year, we both remembered how far ahead it was of today's web front end in tooling, collaboration, compatibility and UI components;
Adobe AIR, one of the first cross-platform runtimes to put web technology into the operating system or bundle it into an executable (an idea borrowed from the Java runtime), paved the way for Cordova, Electron, NodeWebkit, React Native and the rest;
XMLHTTP, built on IE's proprietary ActiveX, became XMLHttpRequest, which gave us Ajax and then Web 2.0;
Google Gears, a 2008 plugin for beefing up web apps, had proprietary APIs that turned into App Cache, Web Workers, WebSQL and other standards (or near-standards);
Cordova/PhoneGap, the first hybrid approach for mobile, was a polyfill and a bridge between the web and the phone. It sped up the web's device APIs, and along with WebOS, FirefoxOS, Chrome Apps, Windows Runtime Apps and others, it shaped Progressive Web Apps;
Years of experiments with Background Pages and Event Pages in Chrome extensions, trying to keep work running in the background, fed straight into the design of Service Workers;
Google's Native Client and Mozilla's asm.js, both chasing native speed on the web, laid the ground for WebAssembly...
See? Flash and its friends were never really alone on this road.
"I got to see you grow up. I can go now."
Maybe that's just how web technology evolves,
and why the open web never dies.
I'm glad Chrome, Firefox and Edge all found words like these:
Flash helped make the web a rich, dynamic experience, and shaped the modern set of web standards.
--- "So long, and thanks for all the Flash" Chromium Blog
Over the years, Flash has helped bring the Web to greatness with innovations in media and animation, which ultimately have been added to the core web platform.
--- "Firefox Roadmap for Flash End-of-Life" Mozilla Blog
Flash led the way on the web for rich content, gaming, animations, and media of all kinds, and inspired many of the current web standards powering HTML5.
--- "The End of an Era – Next Steps for Adobe Flash" Windows Blog
Thank you, Flash.
And thank you to all the others who got to retire with honors.
AI-translated from the original