Flash is dead, long live Fl- actually, no, scratch that, Flash really is dead and it deserved to die. Flash is terrible. The killer blows to Adobe’s multimedia browser plugin were the latest to be delivered in a one-two punch.
First, users of Flash were left open to not one but two “zero-day” vulnerabilities in the same week, affecting users of Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox. Almost immediately, hackers were able to abuse these flaws to dump malware on Windows PCs, which led Mozilla to disable the plugin entirely until users had updated to a secure version.
Then, YouTube - the biggest provider of Flash video ever - announced that it would stop serving its videos using the plugin for anyone visiting the site in a modern browser.
“There were limitations that held it back from becoming our preferred platform for video delivery,” wrote the site’s engineering manager, Richard Leider , four years ago. “Most critically, HTML5 lacked support for Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) that lets us show you more videos with less buffering. “Over the last four years, we’ve worked with browser vendors and the broader community to close those gaps, and now, YouTube uses HTML5 by default in Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and in beta versions of Firefox.”
The writing has been on the wall for Flash for almost a decade - ever since the iPhone launched in 2007 with no support for the plugin. At the time, Apple was lambasted for its absence; the company worked with Google to create a standalone YouTube app, but many other sites were only partly functional until they bowed to user pressure and built “mobile friendly”.
Three years later, the pressure was such that Steve Jobs wrote a rare missive publicly addressing the company’s continued refusal to include the software.
“Flash was created during the PC era - for PCs and mice,” he argued. “Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low-power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards - all areas where Flash falls short.”
A year after Jobs’ letter, Adobe killed the mobile Flash player for Android devices, fully retreating from the post-PC world. With YouTube following suit, it doesn’t look like long until the player is a relic of an internet past. But before we all uninstall it, maybe it’s time to look back at the great hits of Flash gone by.
The End of the World
The End of the World time was, Flash animations ruled the internet. The End of the World wasn’t the best of them, not the first, but it was one that perfectly exemplified the medium for a long time. Scratchy amateurish drawings with worse animation, bad caricatures of George Bush, and jokes which don’t really make sense, it was a surefire viral hit.
Xiao Xiao
But amateurish animation doesn’t necessarily mean inelegant. Xiao Xiao, a nine-part series which started in April 2001, began as just two stick figures fighting in a featureless room, and static pictures don’t do it justice: the beauty is in motion. Over the course of the series’ progression, the animation got better and better, but even from the first episode, what stood out was stylish choreography which could put Hollywood to shame. He breaks a stick and kicks it into a guy’s face! Eleven-year-old me thought this was great.
Salad Fingers
Created by the British cartoonist David Firth, Salad Fingers felt like one of the first flash animations that went fully viral, inhabiting normal pop culture as well as the weird internet one. That was mostly because it was relentlessly, inexplicably creepy. Salad Fingers is a green man with weird fingers and a weirder voice. He wants to stroke your rusty kettle. He likes spoons. The series is still, infrequently, being produced, with the most recent episode coming out in 2013.
Weebl and Bob
Another British creation Weebl and Bob are two wobbly eggs who like pie. That set-up took the animation through over 100 episodes, onto MTV in a series of licensed indents, and a made for DVD special. The creator, Jonti Picking, was also hired by Anchor Butter to make adverts for the product featuring cows rather than eggs. The noughties were weird.
Homestar Runner
The undoubted star of early Flash animations is Homestar Runner. Another comedy series, initially starring Homestar Runner himself, it soon sprawled into a whole host of linked series - and spawned an even bigger star than its lead in the form of Strong Bad, an angry Mexican wrestler who responds to readers emails and mocks typos. When a new episode was dropped without warning in October 2014, the internet freaked out - and with reason.
Hedgehog Launch
While YouTube killed the Flash animation star, the plugin stuck around a bit longer, thanks to online games - at least until the game development platform Unity superseded it there too. Hedgehog Launch was the breakout hit of developer John Cooney, better known as jmtb02, and tasked players with launching a hedgehog into space. Addictive, intuitive, fun and cute, it was a sure-fire hit, and propelled Cooney into a career making increasingly smart games that never lost sight of the need for pure viral magic.
The Helicopter Game
This simple flight sim, which requires you to deftly tap the mouse button to keep your chopper airborne, is one of the most played Flash games in the history of the platform. It’s also surely an influence on one of the biggest smartphone gaming hits of 2013: Flappy Bird. Be warned: if you start playing it, you probably won’t get anything else done today.
