![]() ![]() For its coverage of the 20th anniversary of September 11th, USA Today republished some 2002 articles timed with the first anniversary and that included recreating some Flash-based interactives. Some newsrooms have taken it upon themselves to rebuild Flash content. Like all Americans, we watched the horrific events of 9/11 and understand the important role Flash played in helping media organizations depict and tell the stories of that tragic day.”Ī Samsung-owned software called Harman has also partnered with Adobe and can help companies to keep Flash-based content running. Unfortunately, these older web pages can no longer be played due to the Flash plugin being blocked from loading in the browser. “I can’t say I’ve seen any news organization make the type of concerted effort that animations, games, and electronic literature communities are to save this history.”įor its part, an Adobe spokesperson said in a statement: “Adobe stopped supporting Flash Player beginning December 31, 2020. “Unfortunately it’s a lot more difficult than we’d like, particularly because ‘Flash’ encompasses generations of work and the platform’s code complexity grew with every iteration of Adobe’s scripting language,” Salter said. However, that process can be difficult and won’t necessarily work to save all content built in Flash. The Internet Archive has made a push to re-create, save and display Flash-based animations, games and other media using an emulator tool called Ruffle. In some corners of the internet, there are efforts to preserve or restore some of that content. “Web preservationists have been sounding the alarm on Flash for a long time,” Salter said. Since then, a host of Flash-based content across the web has become inaccessible. Some operating systems and browsers started discontinuing Flash early, and the software’s official “end-of-life” day came on December 31, 2020, when Adobe ended support for Flash and encouraged users to uninstall it because it would no longer get security updates. In 2017, Adobe announced it would pull the plug on Flash at the end of 2020. Flash was increasingly mocked and despised for being buggy, laden with security vulnerabilities, a battery drain and requiring a plug-in to use. In the following years, the more open web standard HTML5 - which allowed developers to embed content directly onto webpages - gained traction, and made the add-on Flash extension less useful. NetPhotos3/Alamy Stock PhotoĪdobe Flash Player is officially dead. A year later, Adobe said it would no longer develop Flash on mobile devices.Īdobe Flash Player website. Jobs’ refusal to support Flash on iOS devices was widely seen as the start of its decline. In 2010, Apple founder Steve Jobs wrote a scathing letter bemoaning Flash’s security issues and the fact that it was a proprietary system underlying so much of the internet. “Flash’s ease of use for creating interactive visualizations and explorable content shaped early experiments with web coverage, and particularly served as a preview for what adding dynamic elements to a story could provide,” Anastasia Salter, associate professor at the University of Central Florida and author of the book “Flash: Building the Interactive Web,” told CNN Business in an email.īut despite enabling those innovations, Flash was also controversial. The software also helped journalism to evolve beyond print newspapers, TV and radio, ushering in an era of digital news coverage that used interactive maps, data visualizations and other novel ways of presenting information to audiences. Animated stars of the early internet such as Charlie the Unicorn, Salad Fingers and the game Club Penguin were all brought to life thanks to Flash. It shouldn’t.”Īdobe Flash played a critical role in the internet’s development by being the first tool that made it easy to create and view animations, games and videos online across nearly any browser and device. ![]() “I just feel like the internet is rotting at an even faster pace, ironically, because of innovation. Everything that’s not a piece of text or a flat picture is basically destined to rot and die when new methods of delivering the content replace it,” Pacheco told CNN Business. “This is really about the problem of what I call the boneyard of the internet. As an online producer for the Post’s website in the late 1990s and later for America Online, some of the work he helped build has disappeared. ABC Newsĭan Pacheco, professor of practice and chair of journalism innovation at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, has experienced the issue firsthand. An interactive piece from ABC News detailing the flight paths of the planes that hit the World Trade Center is no longer viewable because it was built on Adobe Flash. ![]()
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