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Source. Every date and quotation on this plate was read out of a file in reference/5-extinction/death-of-flash/ before it was written down, and the three that could be re-checked live were re-checked on 24 August 2026. Adobe's announcement of 25 July 2017 credits collaboration with several of our technology partners and names Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, and promises only to stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020; that wording is still live at blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2017/07/25/adobe-flash-update, though the other well known URL for the same post, ending /flash-eol, now returns a hard 404. The two sentences that matter are from the Wayback capture of Adobe's end-of-life page dated 1 January 2021: support ends after December 31, 2020, and Adobe will block Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021. Google's flat statement of the result is from support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/10706877, saved to the reference folder on 24 August 2026 with both quoted strings grepped back out of the saved bytes rather than taken from a summary. The Steve Jobs letter was fetched for this plate from the earliest 200 capture the Wayback CDX index holds for apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/. It signs off April, 2010 and carries no day, so no day is printed.

The palette and three of the field marks are one file. Every color on the stage is read off the 2Advanced Studios capture of 29 November 2001. #2D3851 and #253048 are that page's own bgcolor attributes, and #617087, #6D8693, #9BAAC1 and #F3F3F3 are the four values it used to repaint Internet Explorer's scrollbar. That block is quoted verbatim in the field marks, tab characters and all, and is shown as a specimen rather than applied, because not one of those properties exists in a shipping browser any more. The four Dreamweaver functions named beside it, stamped //v3.0 and //v4.0, are in the same file.

The runtime is a reconstruction, and the reason it is not Ruffle is a measurement. Nothing on this page is an .swf and no Flash Player is emulated. The preloader, the stage, the tweens, the sound and the context menu were written for this plate in HTML, CSS and JavaScript; the sound is synthesized in the browser rather than fetched, is off until you press the toggle, and is a few clicks rather than somebody's music. Ruffle was the alternative, and it is the one genuinely redistributable thing in this unit, licensed MIT or Apache-2.0 at the user's option. It is not here because its self-hosted web build for v0.4.1 unpacks to 30,510,007 bytes with two WebAssembly cores of 14,201,591 and 14,146,177, all measured out of the zip in the reference folder on 24 August 2026, and because the only SWF this guide holds a license for is a 702 byte arithmetic test from Ruffle's own suite. That the Internet Archive injects Ruffle into every capture it serves is not a memory: ruffle.js and a window.RufflePlayer.config block sit in the Wayback preamble of both captures in this folder, including the 2001 page the palette came from.

Deliberately absent. Any percentage of the web that ran Flash, because there is no study in the source folder to point at, and the last Flash Player version number for the same reason. The exact wording a browser put inside the dead rectangle after 12 January 2021: the strings that surface in a search are the older out-of-date block, not the post end-of-life one, so that rectangle carries a puzzle piece and no invented copy. What the 2001 Macromedia context menu actually listed, which is why right-clicking the live stage demonstrates the taking rather than the menu. Any claim that Ruffle plays everything: its own README says it supports ActionScript 1, 2 and 3 pretty well, but it's still not finished by any means, and that is quoted rather than sharpened into a sentence about ActionScript 3. The Jobs letter is on the page as a position taken in April 2010 and not as a cause, because attributing the 2021 block to it is an argument. And the clock in the dock is a mechanic: Flash Player compared a date, it never offered you a button.

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