I’ve kept Adobe Flash installed on my main machine for far longer than I probably should have. I don’t quite know why, but I guess I just wanted to still have it available just in case. Blame my desire for
Anyway, Flash has pretty much needed to update every damn day or, at least, every time I’ve done an actual reboot of the system. Every time I got the happy fun message that it’s time to updated my flash player software and each time I’ve gone through the process.. and by go through the process I mean I closed it and didn’t update a damn thing in the past few months.
A few days ago I did another reboot and got an update message that was different from normal. Instead of Flash simply alerting me to the update it offered the update but addressed that Flash will reach End of Life on December 31st of 2020.
This was pretty much the signal I was waiting for to finally say “okay, it’s time to finally get rid of this crap” and conveniently an uninstall option was available alongside the standard remind me later and download options. After a quick enough uninstall routine I was taken to the Adobe Flash web page where a thank you message was presented to me for using the program, and that the Adobe team was proud of how it helped grow the idea of media content on the web.
For as flawed as it would wind up being, Flash really was something amazing. Efficient and capable, even I, early on, used it heavily in some web projects which are, of course, lost to time. It allowed us to do more with the web than we could imagine and really did set a standard that later HTML5 and the like would follow and expand upon in practical usage, but with completely different ideas on security.
I’ll have more to say about Flash when the end of life date comes. I want to do some research and really familiarize myself with its rise and fall. All I can end with is that I’m appreciative for what the technology did for the web experience 20 years ago. It was pretty damn cool.
More to come, as always.