The death of Flash

Requires the Macromedia Flash Player

0% LOADING

The death of Flash

The stage had a size

This movie is 760 by 428, and it will not reflow into your window. Resize: it scales, it never rearranges. The browser was furniture built around a rectangle somebody chose in a tool.

SCALE 1.00

Two keyframes and a curve

You set where a thing starts and where it stops. The runtime drew every frame between them. Nobody hand-animated the middle, which is why one person with a timeline could out-move an entire engineering department.

EASING cubic-bezier(.25,.1,.25,1)

Sound started without asking

A movie could open its audio channel the instant it loaded, on a page you had not agreed to yet. That was ordinary. It is not acceptable now, so it is off here until you turn it on, and it is a few synthesized clicks rather than somebody's music.

CHANNEL CLOSED

Look at the bottom of your window

Every installed copy of Flash Player carried the date it would stop. Not a server, not a license check, not a subscription: a comparison, running on your own machine, against your own clock.

SYSTEM DATE 11 JANUARY 2021

Try right-clicking the stage.

It did not rot. It was switched off.

Adobe announced the end on 25 July 2017. The post credits the decision to collaboration with several of our technology partners and names them: Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla. The promise itself is worded carefully: we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020. Updating and distributing. Adobe did not say it would break anything, and for three years and five months it did not.

The sentence that mattered went on the end-of-life page instead, next to the one confirming that support ended after 31 December 2020:

Adobe will block Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021.Adobe, Flash Player EOL General Information Page

Twelve days into the year, the player already installed on your machine turned off the files already on your disk. Google's own note is flatter: Flash content, including audio and video, will no longer play back in any version of Chrome. Five companies controlled how a runtime reached a computer, and they agreed a date. Nothing wore out. Apple had refused to carry it at all seven years earlier, in a letter signed Steve Jobs, April 2010, arguing that Flash was created during the PC era, but that was a position taken, not a cause, and this plate does not treat it as one.

You can put this clock back: . Nobody could put that one back.

Field marks

The preloader is the entire first impression

A percentage counting up on an empty stage, with nothing behind it and often no way past it, was a normal and accepted way to greet a visitor.

A fixed stage, centered in a void

No reflow and no breakpoints. The design had a pixel size, and the window scaled it or let it float in a colored field.

The page repaints the browser's own chrome

The 2001 capture this plate's colors came from carries this, verbatim. Proprietary to Internet Explorer, gone from every shipping browser, and a perfect field mark: the page did not stop at its own edges.

BODY {
scrollbar-arrow-color:#FFFFFF;
	scrollbar-base-color:#6D8693;
	scrollbar-shadow-color:#F3F3F3;
	scrollbar-face-color:#617087;
	scrollbar-highlight-color:#F3F3F3;
	scrollbar-dark-shadow-color:white;
	scrollbar-3d-light-color:#9BAAC1;
}

Dreamweaver fingerprints in the source

The same capture carries MM_swapImgRestore, MM_preloadImages, MM_findObj and MM_swapImage, stamped //v3.0 and //v4.0. A whole generation of sites shipped those four functions unedited.

Right-click was taken from you

Flash Player replaced the browser's context menu with its own on every page that embedded a movie. What that 2001 menu actually listed is not reproduced above, because no capture of it is in this guide's source folder. The behavior is reproduced. The wording is not invented.

What it solved, and what took it

One runtime behaved the same in every browser, and anybody who could draw two keyframes could make a thing move and put it online without asking permission or learning four incompatible implementations. What replaced it is a video player and an upload form, on somebody else's account.

Some of it came back

Ruffle is a Flash Player emulator written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, and its own site says Licensed MIT/Apache 2.0, you're free to use Ruffle however you please! That is the only interesting sentence in this unit, because it means nobody can switch it off again. Its README is honest about the limits: Ruffle supports ActionScript 1, 2 and 3 pretty well, but it's still not finished by any means.

The Internet Archive loads it into every capture it serves. The 2001 page this plate's palette was read from arrives in 2026 with ruffle.js in its head, injected by the archive, above the 2001 markup. The archive plays Flash. The company that made it will not.

Ruffle is not on this page, and the reason is a measurement rather than an opinion. Its self-hosted web build unpacks to 30,510,007 bytes, two WebAssembly cores at 14,201,591 and 14,146,177. The only SWF this guide holds a license for is a 702 byte arithmetic test from Ruffle's own suite. Everything above is a reconstruction in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and it weighs what one page weighs.

Back to the directory.

Sources, and what is deliberately absent