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Wikipedia

Adobe Flash

April 09, 2023

This article is about the multimedia software platform. For the application/animation software, see Adobe Animate. For the player, see Adobe Flash Player.

Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players. Flash displays text, vector graphics, and raster graphics to provide animations, video games, and applications. It allows streaming of audio and video, and can capture mouse, keyboard, microphone, and camera input.

Adobe Flash
Developer(s)
Target platform(s)Web browsers, iOS (via third-party software), Android, Windows, macOS, Linux
Editor software
Player software
Format(s)
Programming language(s)ActionScript
Application(s)
StatusActive only for enterprise users and all users in China, discontinued everywhere else, i.e. outside China
LicenseProprietary
Websiteadobe.com/flash

Artists may produce Flash graphics and animations using Adobe Animate (formerly known as Adobe Flash Professional). Software developers may produce applications and video games using Adobe Flash Builder, FlashDevelop, Flash Catalyst, or any text editor combined with the Apache Flex SDK. End users view Flash content via Flash Player (for web browsers), Adobe AIR (for desktop or mobile apps), or third-party players such as Scaleform (for video games). Adobe Flash Player (which is available on Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux) enables end users to view Flash content using web browsers. Adobe Flash Lite enabled viewing Flash content on older smartphones, but since has been discontinued and superseded by Adobe AIR.

The ActionScript programming language allows the development of interactive animations, video games, web applications, desktop applications, and mobile applications. Programmers can implement Flash software using an IDE such as Adobe Animate, Adobe Flash Builder, Adobe Director, FlashDevelop, and Powerflasher FDT. Adobe AIR enables full-featured desktop and mobile applications to be developed with Flash and published for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Wii U, and Nintendo Switch.

Flash was initially used to create fully-interactive websites, but this approach was phased out with the introduction of HTML5. Instead, Flash found a niche as the dominant platform for online multimedia content, particularly for browser games. Following an open letter written by Steve Jobs in 2010 stating that he would not approve the use of Flash on Apple's iOS devices due to numerous security flaws, use of Flash declined as Adobe transitioned to the Adobe Air platform. The Flash Player was deprecated in 2017 and officially discontinued at the end of 2020 for all users outside China, as well as non-enterprise users,[6] with many web browsers and operating systems scheduled to remove the Flash Player software around the same time. Adobe continues to develop Adobe Animate, which supports web standards such as HTML5 instead of the Flash format.[7]

Applications

Websites

In the early 2000s, Flash was widely installed on desktop computers, and was often used to display interactive web pages and online games, and to play video and audio content.[8] In 2005, YouTube was founded by former PayPal employees, and it used Adobe Flash Player as a means to display compressed video content on the web.[8]

Between 2000 and 2010, numerous businesses used Flash-based websites to launch new products, or to create interactive company portals.[9] Notable users include Nike, Hewlett-Packard (more commonly known as HP), Nokia, General Electric, World Wildlife Fund, HBO, Cartoon Network, Disney, and Motorola.[9][10] After Adobe introduced hardware-accelerated 3D for Flash (Stage3D), Flash websites saw a growth of 3D content for product demonstrations and virtual tours.[11][12]

In 2007, YouTube offered videos in HTML5 format to support the iPhone and iPad, which did not support Flash Player.[8] After a controversy with Apple, Adobe stopped developing Flash Player for Mobile, focusing its efforts on Adobe AIR applications and HTML5 animation.[8] In 2015, Google introduced Google Swiffy, a tool that converted Flash animation to HTML5, which Google used to automatically convert Flash web ads for mobile devices.[13] In 2016, Google discontinued Swiffy and its support.[14] In 2015, YouTube switched to HTML5 technology on most devices by default;[15][16][17] however, YouTube supported the Flash-based video player for older web browsers and devices until 2017.[18]

Rich Web Applications

Main article: Rich web application

After Flash 5 introduced ActionScript in 2000, developers combined the visual and programming capabilities of Flash to produce interactive experiences and applications for the Web.[19] Such Web-based applications eventually became known as "Rich Internet Applications"[19] and later "Rich Web Applications".

In 2004, Macromedia Flex was released, and specifically targeted the application development market.[19] Flex introduced new user interface components, advanced data visualization components, data remoting, and a modern IDE (Flash Builder).[19][20] Flex competed with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and Microsoft Silverlight during its tenure.[19] Flex was upgraded to support integration with remote data sources, using AMF, BlazeDS, Adobe LiveCycle, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and others.[21]

Between 2006 and 2016, the Speedtest.net web service conducted over 9.0 billion speed tests with a utility built with Adobe Flash.[22][23] In 2016, the service shifted to HTML5 due to the decreasing availability of Adobe Flash Player on PCs.[24]

Developers could create Flash web applications and rich web applications in ActionScript 3.0 programming language with IDEs, including Adobe Flash Builder, FlashDevelop and Powerflasher FDT. Flex applications were typically built using Flex frameworks such as PureMVC.[21]

Video games

 
 
Screenshots and footage of Flash games QWOP, Solipskier, and Hundreds

Flash video games were popular on the Internet, with portals like Newgrounds, Kongregate, and Armor Games dedicated to hosting Flash-based games. Many Flash games were developed by individuals or groups of friends due to the simplicity of the software.[25] Popular Flash games include Farmville, Alien Hominid, QWOP and Club Penguin.[26][27]

Adobe introduced various technologies to help build video games, including Adobe AIR (to release games for desktop or mobile platforms), Adobe Scout (to improve performance), CrossBridge (to convert C++-based games to run in Flash), and Stage3D (to support GPU-accelerated video games). 3D frameworks like Away3D and Flare3D simplified creation of 3D content for Flash.[citation needed]

Adobe AIR allows the creation of Flash-based mobile games, which may be published to the Google Play and Apple app stores.[28][29][30]

Flash is also used to build interfaces and HUDs for 3D video games using Scaleform GFx, a technology that renders Flash content within non-Flash video games. Scaleform is supported by more than 10 major video game engines including Unreal Engine and UDK, CryEngine, and PhyreEngine, and has been used to provide 3D interfaces for more than 150 major video game titles since its launch in 2003.[citation needed]

Film and animation

Main articles: List of Flash animated films and List of Flash animated television series

Notable users of Flash include DHX Media Vancouver for productions including Pound Puppies, Littlest Pet Shop and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Fresh TV for Total Drama, Nelvana for 6teen and Clone High, Williams Street for Metalocalypse and Squidbillies, Nickelodeon Animation Studio for El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, Starz Media for Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!, among others.[citation needed]

History

FutureWave

The precursor to Flash was SmartSketch, a product published by FutureWave Software in 1993. The company was founded by Charlie Jackson, Jonathan Gay, and Michelle Welsh.[31][32][33][34] SmartSketch was a vector drawing application for pen computers running the PenPoint OS.[35][36] When PenPoint failed in the marketplace, SmartSketch was ported to Microsoft Windows and Mac OS.[32][37]

As the Internet became more popular, FutureWave realized the potential for a vector-based web animation tool that might challenge Macromedia Shockwave technology.[31][32] In 1995, FutureWave modified SmartSketch by adding frame-by-frame animation features and released this new product as FutureSplash Animator on Macintosh and PC.[31][32][38][39]

FutureWave approached Adobe Systems with an offer to sell them FutureSplash in 1995, but Adobe turned down the offer at that time.[32] Microsoft wanted to create an "online TV network" (MSN 2.0) and adopted FutureSplash animated content as a central part of it.[32] Disney Online used FutureSplash animations for their subscription-based service Disney's Daily Blast.[31][32] Fox Broadcasting Company launched The Simpsons using FutureSplash.[32]

Macromedia

In November 1996, FutureSplash was acquired by Macromedia, and Macromedia re-branded and released FutureSplash Animator as Macromedia Flash 1.0. Flash was a two-part system, a graphics and animation editor known as Macromedia Flash, and a player known as Macromedia Flash Player.[40]

FutureSplash Animator was an animation tool originally developed for pen-based computing devices. Due to the small size of the FutureSplash Viewer, it was particularly suited for download on the Web. Macromedia distributed Flash Player as a free browser plugin in order to quickly gain market share. By 2005, more computers worldwide had Flash Player installed than any other Web media format, including Java, QuickTime, RealNetworks, and Windows Media Player.[41]

Macromedia upgraded the Flash system between 1996 and 1999 adding MovieClips, Actions (the precursor to ActionScript), Alpha transparency, and other features. As Flash matured, Macromedia's focus shifted from marketing it as a graphics and media tool to promoting it as a Web application platform, adding scripting and data access capabilities to the player while attempting to retain its small footprint.[citation needed]

In 2000, the first major version of ActionScript was developed, and released with Flash 5. Actionscript 2.0 was released with Flash MX 2004 and supported object-oriented programming, improved UI components and other programming features. The last version of Flash released by Macromedia was Flash 8, which focused on graphical upgrades such as filters (blur, drop shadow, etc.), blend modes (similar to Adobe Photoshop), and advanced features for FLV video.[citation needed]

Adobe

On December 3, 2005, Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia[42] along with the entire Macromedia product line including Flash, Dreamweaver, Director/Shockwave, Fireworks, and Authorware.[citation needed]

In 2007, Adobe's first version release was Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, the ninth major version of Flash. It introduced the ActionScript 3.0 programming language, which supported modern programming practices and enabled business applications to be developed with Flash. Adobe Flex Builder (built on Eclipse) targeted the enterprise application development market, and was also released the same year. Flex Builder included the Flex SDK, a set of components that included charting, advanced UI, and data services (Flex Data Services).[citation needed]

In 2008, Adobe released the tenth version of Flash, Adobe Flash CS4. Flash 10 improved animation capabilities within the Flash editor, adding a motion editor panel (similar to Adobe After Effects), inverse kinematics (bones), basic 3D object animation, object-based animation, and other text and graphics features. Flash Player 10 included an in-built 3D engine (without GPU acceleration) that allowed basic object transformations in 3D space (position, rotation, scaling).[citation needed]

Also in 2008, Adobe released the first version of Adobe Integrated Runtime (later re-branded as Adobe AIR), a runtime engine that replaced Flash Player, and provided additional capabilities to the ActionScript 3.0 language to build desktop and mobile applications. With AIR, developers could access the file system (the user's files and folders), and connected devices such as a joystick, gamepad, and sensors for the first time.[citation needed]

In 2011, Adobe Flash Player 11 was released, and with it the first version of Stage3D, allowing GPU-accelerated 3D rendering for Flash applications and games on desktop platforms such as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.[43] Adobe further improved 3D capabilities from 2011 to 2013, adding support for 3D rendering on Android and iOS platforms, alpha-channels, compressed textures, texture atlases, and other features.[44][45] Adobe AIR was upgraded to support 64-bit computers, and to allow developers to add additional functionality to the AIR runtime using AIR Native Extensions (ANE).

In May 2014, Adobe announced that Adobe AIR was used in over 100,000 unique applications and had over 1 billion installations logged worldwide.[46] Adobe AIR was voted the Best Mobile Application Development product at the Consumer Electronics Show on two consecutive years (CES 2014 and CES 2015).[47][48]

In 2016, Adobe renamed Flash Professional, the primary authoring software for Flash content, to Adobe Animate to reflect its growing use for authoring HTML5 content in favor of Flash content.[49]

Open Source

Adobe has taken steps to reduce or eliminate Flash licensing costs. For instance, the SWF file format documentation is provided free of charge[50] after they relaxed the requirement of accepting a non-disclosure agreement to view it in 2008.[51] Adobe also created the Open Screen Project which removes licensing fees and opens data protocols for Flash.

Adobe has also open-sourced many components relating to Flash.

  • In 2006, the ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) which implements ActionScript 3 was donated as open-source to Mozilla Foundation, to begin work on the Tamarin virtual machine that would implement the ECMAScript 4 language standard with the help of the Mozilla community.[52] It was released under the terms of a MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license and includes the specification for the ActionScript bytecode format; Tamarin Project jointly managed by Mozilla and Adobe Systems[53] It is now considered obsolete by Mozilla.
  • In 2011, the Adobe Flex Framework was donated as open-source to the Apache Software Foundation and rebranded as Apache Flex.[54] Some saw this move as Adobe abandoning Flex, and stepping away from the Flash Platform as a whole.[55][56] Sources from Apache say that "Enterprise application development is no longer a focus at Adobe. At least as Flash is concerned, Adobe is concentrating on games and video.",[55][57] and they conclude that "Flex Innovation is Exploding!".[57] The donated source code included a partly developed AS3 compiler (dubbed "Falcon") and the BlazeDS set of technologies.[56][57]
  • In 2013, the CrossBridge C++ cross-compilation toolset was open sourced by Adobe and released on GitHub.[58][59] The project was formerly termed "Alchemy" and "Flash Runtime C++ Compiler", and targeted the game development market to enable C++ video games to run in Adobe Flash Player.[60]

Adobe has not been willing to make complete source code of the Flash Player available for free software development and even though free and open source alternatives such as Shumway and Gnash have been built, they are no longer under active development.[61]

Open Screen Project

On May 1, 2008, Adobe announced the Open Screen Project, with the intent of providing a consistent application interface across devices such as personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics.[62] When the project was announced, seven goals were outlined: the abolition of licensing fees for Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR, the removal of restrictions on the use of the Shockwave Flash (SWF) and Flash Video (FLV) file formats, the publishing of application programming interfaces for porting Flash to new devices, and the publishing of The Flash Cast protocol and Action Message Format (AMF), which let Flash applications receive information from remote databases.[62]

As of February 2009, the specifications removing the restrictions on the use of SWF and FLV/F4V specs have been published.[63] The Flash Cast protocol—now known as the Mobile Content Delivery Protocol—and AMF protocols have also been made available,[63] with AMF available as an open source implementation, BlazeDS.

The list of mobile device providers who have joined the project includes Palm, Motorola, and Nokia,[64] who, together with Adobe, have announced a $10 million Open Screen Project fund.[65]

End of life

See also: Adobe Flash Player § End of life

One of Flash's primary uses on the Internet when it was first released was for building fully immersive, interactive websites. These were typically highly creative site designs that provided more flexibility over what the current HTML standards could provide as well as operate over dial-up connections.[66] However, these sites limited accessibility by "breaking the Back Button", dumping visitors out of the Flash experience entirely by returning them to whatever page they had been on prior to first arriving at the site. Fully Flash-run sites fell out of favor for more strategic use of Flash plugins for video and other interactive features among standard HTML conventions, corresponding with the availability of HTML features like cascading style-sheets in the mid-00's.[67] At the same time, this also led to Flash being used for new apps, including video games and animations.[68] Precursors to YouTube but featuring user-generated Flash animations and games such as Newgrounds became popular destinations, further helping to spread the use of Flash.[66]

Toward the end of the millennium, the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) was released, corresponding with development of Dynamic HTML. Fifteen years later, WAP had largely been replaced by full-capability implementations and the HTML5 standard included more support for interactive and video elements. Support for Flash in these mobile browsers was not included. In 2010, Apple's Steve Jobs famously wrote Thoughts on Flash, an open letter to Adobe criticizing the closed nature of the Flash platform and the inherent security problems with the application to explain why Flash was not supported on iOS.[69][70] Adobe created the Adobe AIR environment as a means to appease Apple's concerns, and spent time legally fighting Apple over terms of its App Store to allow AIR to be used on the iOS. While Adobe eventually won, allowing for other third-party development environments to get access to the iOS, Apple's decision to block Flash itself was considered the "death blow" to the Flash application.[68] In November 2011, about a year after Jobs' open letter, Adobe announced it would no longer be developing Flash and advised developers to switch to HTML5.[71]

In 2011, Adobe ended support for Flash on Android.[71] Adobe stated that Flash platform was transitioning to Adobe AIR and OpenFL, a multi-target open-source implementation of the Flash API.[72] In 2015, Adobe rebranded Flash Professional, the main Flash authoring environment, as Adobe Animate to emphasize its expanded support for HTML5 authoring, and stated that it would "encourage content creators to build with new web standards" rather than use Flash.[73]

In July 2017, Adobe deprecated Flash, and announced its End-Of-Life (EOL) at the end of 2020, and will cease support, distribution, and security updates for Flash Player.[6]

With Flash's EOL announced, many browsers took steps to gradually restrict Flash content (caution users before launching it, eventually blocking all content without an option to play it). By January 2021, all major browsers were blocking all Flash content unconditionally. Only IE11, niche browser forks, and some browsers built for China plan to continue support. Furthermore, excluding the China variant of Flash, Flash execution software has a built-in kill switch which prevents it from playing Flash after January 12, 2021.[74] In January 2021, Microsoft released an optional update KB4577586 which removes Flash Player from Windows; in July 2021 this update was pushed out as a security update and applied automatically to all remaining systems.[75]

Post EOL support

Main article: Adobe Flash Player § Post-EOL support

Adobe Flash will still be supported in China and worldwide on some specialized enterprise platforms beyond 2020.[5]

Content preservation projects

As early as 2014, around the same time that Adobe began encouraging Flash developers to transition their works to HTML5 standards, others began efforts to preserve existing Flash content through emulation of Flash in open standards. While some Flash applications were utilitarian, several applications had been shown to be experimental art, while others had laid the foundation of independent video game development.[76] An early project was Mozilla's Shumway, an open source project that attempted to emulate the Flash standard in HTML5, but the project was shuttered as the team found that more developers were switching to HTML5 than seeking to keep their content in Flash, coupled with the difficulties in assuring full compatibility. Google had developed the Swiffy application, released in 2014, to convert Flash applications to HTML5-compatible scripts for viewing on mobile devices, but it was shut down in 2016.[76]

Closer to Flash's EOL date in 2020, there were more concentrated efforts simply to preserve existing Flash applications, including websites, video games, and animations beyond Flash's EOL.[68][77][78] The Internet Archive introduced Ruffle and Emularity Flash emulators to emulate Flash games and animations without the security holes in November 2020, opening a new collection for creators and users to save and preserve Flash content.[79][80] By January 2020, the Flashpoint project collected more than 38,000 Flash applications, excluding those that were commercial products, and offered as a large freely available archive for users to download.[81][82] Kongregate, one of the larger sites that offered Flash games, has been working with the Strong Museum of Play to preserve its games.[76]

Format

FLA

Flash source files are in the FLA format and contain graphics and animation, as well as embedded assets such as bitmap images, audio files, and FLV video files. The Flash source file format was a proprietary format and Adobe Animate and Adobe Flash Pro were the only available authoring tools capable of editing such files. Flash source files (.fla) may be compiled into Flash movie files (.swf) using Adobe Animate. Note that FLA files can be edited, but output (.swf) files cannot.

SWF

Main article: SWF

Flash movie files were in the SWF format, traditionally called "ShockWave Flash" movies, "Flash movies", or "Flash applications", usually have a .swf file extension, and may be used in the form of a web page plug-in, strictly "played" in a standalone Flash Player, or incorporated into a self-executing Projector movie (with the .exe extension in Microsoft Windows). Flash Video files[spec 1] have a .flv file extension and are either used from within .swf files or played through a flv-aware player, such as VLC, or QuickTime and Windows Media Player with external codecs added.

The use of vector graphics combined with program code allows Flash files to be smaller—and thus allows streams to use less bandwidth—than the corresponding bitmaps or video clips. For content in a single format (such as just text, video, or audio), other alternatives may provide better performance and consume less CPU power than the corresponding Flash movie, for example, when using transparency or making large screen updates such as photographic or text fades.

In addition to a vector-rendering engine, the Flash Player includes a virtual machine called the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM) for scripting interactivity at run-time, with video, MP3-based audio, and bitmap graphics. As of Flash Player 8, it offered two video codecs: On2 Technologies VP6 and Sorenson Spark, and run-time JPEG, Progressive JPEG, PNG, GIF and (DWG) AutoCAD Drawing file (WMV) Windows Metafile capability.

3D

Main article: Stage3D

Flash Player 11 introduced a full 3D shader API, called Stage3D, which is fairly similar to WebGL.[83][84] Stage3D enables GPU-accelerated rendering of 3D graphics within Flash games and applications, and has been used to build Angry Birds, and a couple of other notable games.

Various 3D frameworks have been built for Flash using Stage3D, such as Away3D 4,[84] CopperCube,[85] Flare3D,[86] and Starling.[87] Professional game engines like Unreal Engine[88][89] and Unity also export Flash versions which use Stage3D to render 3D graphics.

Flash Video

Main article: Flash Video

Virtually all browser plugins for video are free of charge and cross-platform, including Adobe's offering of Flash Video, which was introduced with Flash version 6. Flash Video had been a popular choice for websites due to the large installed user base and programmability of Flash. In 2010, Apple publicly criticized Adobe Flash, including its implementation of video playback for not taking advantage of hardware acceleration, one reason Flash was not to be found on Apple's mobile devices. Soon after Apple's criticism, Adobe demoed and released a beta version of Flash 10.1, which used available GPU hardware acceleration even on a Mac. Flash 10.2 beta, released December 2010, added hardware acceleration for the whole video rendering pipeline.

Flash Player supports two distinct modes of video playback, and hardware accelerated video decoding may not be used for older video content. Such content causes excessive CPU usage compared to comparable content played with other players.

Software Rendered Video
Flash Player supports software rendered video since version 6. Such video supports vector animations displayed above the video content. This obligation may, depending on graphic APIs exposed by the operating system, prohibit using a video overlay, like a traditional multimedia player would use, with the consequence that color space conversion and scaling must happen in software.[90]
Hardware Accelerated Video
Flash Player supports hardware accelerated video playback since version 10.2, for H.264, F4V, and FLV video formats. Such video is displayed above all Flash content and takes advantage of video codec chipsets installed on the user's device. Developers must specifically use the "StageVideo" technology within Flash Player in order for hardware decoding to be enabled. Flash Player internally uses technologies such as DirectX Video Acceleration and OpenGL to do so.

In tests done by Ars Technica in 2008 and 2009, Adobe Flash Player performed better on Windows than Mac OS X and Linux with the same hardware.[91][92] Performance has later improved for the latter two, on Mac OS X with Flash Player 10.1,[93] and on Linux with Flash Player 11.[94]

Flash Audio

Flash Audio is most commonly encoded in MP3 or AAC (Advanced Audio Coding); however, it can also use ADPCM, Nellymoser (Nellymoser Asao Codec) and Speex audio codecs. Flash allows sample rates of 11, 22 and 44.1 kHz. It cannot have a 48 kHz audio sample rate, which is the standard TV and DVD sample rate.

On August 20, 2007, Adobe announced on its blog that with Update 3 of Flash Player 9, Flash Video will also implement some parts of the MPEG-4 international standards.[95] Specifically, Flash Player will work with video compressed in H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10), audio compressed using AAC (MPEG-4 Part 3), the F4V, MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14), M4V, M4A, 3GP, and MOV multimedia container formats, 3GPP Timed Text specification (MPEG-4 Part 17), which is a standardized subtitle format and partial parsing capability for the "ilst" atom, which is the ID3 equivalent iTunes uses to store metadata. MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.263 will not work in F4V file format. Adobe also announced that it will be gradually moving away from the FLV format to the standard ISO base media file format (MPEG-4 Part 12) owing to functional limits with the FLV structure when streaming H.264. The final release of the Flash Player implementing some parts of MPEG-4 standards had become available in Fall 2007.[96]

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 does not have acoustic echo cancellation, unlike the VoIP offerings of Skype and Google Voice, making this and earlier versions of Flash less suitable for group calling or meetings. Flash Player 10.3 Beta incorporates acoustic echo cancellation.

ActionScript

Main articles: ActionScript and ActionScript Virtual Machine

Flash programs use ActionScript programming language. It is an enhanced superset of the ECMAScript programming language, with a classical Java-style class model, rather than JavaScript's prototype model.

Specifications

In October 1998, Macromedia disclosed the Flash Version 3 Specification on its website. It did this in response to many new and often semi-open formats competing with SWF, such as Xara's Flare and Sharp's Extended Vector Animation formats. Several developers quickly created a C library for producing SWF. In February 1999, MorphInk 99 was introduced, the first third-party program to create SWF files. Macromedia also hired Middlesoft to create a freely available developers' kit for the SWF file format versions 3 to 5.

Macromedia made the Flash Files specifications for versions 6 and later available only under a non-disclosure agreement, but they are widely available from various sites.

In April 2006, the Flash SWF file format specification was released with details on the then newest version format (Flash 8). Although still lacking specific information on the incorporated video compression formats (On2, Sorenson Spark, etc.), this new documentation covered all the new features offered in Flash v8 including new ActionScript commands, expressive filter controls, and so on. The file format specification document is offered only to developers who agree to a license agreement that permits them to use the specifications only to develop programs that can export to the Flash file format. The license does not allow the use of the specifications to create programs that can be used for playback of Flash files. The Flash 9 specification was made available under similar restrictions.[97]

In June 2009, Adobe launched the Open Screen Project (), which made the SWF specification available without restrictions. Previously, developers could not use the specification for making SWF-compatible players, but only for making SWF-exporting authoring software. The specification still omits information on codecs such as Sorenson Spark, however.[98]

Animation tools

Official tools

Main article: Adobe Animate

The Adobe Animate authoring program is primarily used to design graphics and animation and publish the same for websites, web applications, and video games. The program also offers limited support for audio and video embedding and ActionScript scripting.

Adobe released Adobe LiveMotion, designed to create interactive animation content and export it to a variety of formats, including SWF. LiveMotion failed to gain any notable user base.[specify]

In February 2003, Macromedia purchased Presedia, which had developed a Flash authoring tool that automatically converted PowerPoint files into Flash. Macromedia subsequently released the new product as Breeze, which included many new enhancements.

Third-party tools

Main article: Comparison of vector graphics editors

Various free and commercial software packages can output animations into the Flash SWF format including:

  • Ajax Animator aims to create a Flash development environment
  • Alligator Flash Designer
  • Amara Web
  • Apple Keynote allows users to export presentations to Flash SWF animations
  • CelAction2D
  • Clash
  • Express Animator
  • KoolMoves
  • KToon can edit vectors and generate SWF, but its interface is very different from Macromedia's
  • Anime Studio is a 2D animation software package specialized for character animation, that creates Flash animations
  • OpenOffice Impress
  • Question Writer publishes its quizzes to Flash animations
  • Salasaga
  • Screencast and Screencam, produces demos or tutorials by capturing the screen and generating a Flash animation of the same
  • SWiSH Max is an animation editor with preset animation, developed by an ex-employee of Macromedia, that can output Flash animations
  • Synfig
  • Toon Boom is a traditional animation tool that can output Flash animations
  • Swift 3d for vector 3D rendering & animation
  • Toufee
  • Vyond is a software as a service tool to create animated videos.
  • Xara Photo & Graphic Designer can output Flash animations

The Flash 4 Linux project was an initiative to develop an open source Linux application as an alternative to Adobe Animate. Development plans included authoring capacity for 2D animation, and tweening, as well as outputting SWF file formats. F4L evolved into an editor that was capable of authoring 2D animation and publishing of SWF files. Flash 4 Linux was renamed UIRA. UIRA intended to combine the resources and knowledge of the F4L project and the Qflash project, both of which were Open Source applications that aimed to provide an alternative to the proprietary Adobe Flash.

Programming tools

Official tools

Adobe provides a series of tools to develop software applications and video games for Flash:

  • Apache Flex SDK – a free, open source SDK to compile Flash-based rich web applications from source code. The Apache Flex ActionScript 3.0 compiler generates SWF files from ActionScript 3 files. Flex was the primary ActionScript 3 compiler and was actively developed by Adobe before it was donated to Apache Software Foundation in 2011.
  • Adobe Animate – primarily used to design graphics and animation, but supports ActionScript scripting and debugging.
  • Adobe Flash Builder – enterprise application development & debugging, contains the Flex SDK with UI and charting components.
  • Adobe Scout – a visual profiler to optimize the performance of Flash content.
  • CrossBridge – a free SDK to cross-compile C++ code to run in Flash Player.

Third-party tools

Third-party development tools have been created to assist developers in creating software applications and video games with Flash.

  • FlashDevelop is a free and open source Flash ActionScript IDE, which includes a project manager and debugger for building applications on Flash Player and Adobe AIR.
  • Powerflasher FDT is a commercial ActionScript IDE similar to FlashDevelop.
  • Haxe is an open source, high-level object-oriented programming language geared towards web-content creation that can compile SWF files from Haxe programs. As of 2012, Haxe can build programs for Flash Player that perform faster than the same application built with the Adobe Flex SDK compiler, due to additional compiler optimizations supported in Haxe.[citation needed]
  • SWFTools (specifically, swfc) is an open-source ActionScript 3.0 compiler which generates SWF files from script files, which includes SVG tags.
  • swfmill and MTASC also provide tools to create SWF files by compiling text, ActionScript or XML files into Flash animations
  • Ming library, to create SWF files programmatically, has interfaces for C, PHP, C++, Perl, Python, and Ruby. It is able to import and export graphics from XML into SWF.

Players

Proprietary

Adobe Flash Player is the multimedia and application player originally developed by Macromedia and acquired by Adobe Systems. It plays SWF files, which can be created by Adobe Animate, Apache Flex, or a number of other Adobe Systems and 3rd party tools. It has support for a scripting language called ActionScript, which can be used to display Flash Video from an SWF file.

Scaleform GFx is a commercial alternative Flash player that features fully hardware-accelerated 2D graphics rendering using the GPU. Scaleform has high conformance with both Flash 10 ActionScript 3[99] and Flash 8 ActionScript 2. Scaleform GFx is a game development middleware solution that helps create graphical user interfaces or HUDs within 3D video games. It does not work with web browsers.

IrfanView, an image viewer, uses Flash Player to display SWF files.

Open source

OpenFL, a cross-platform open-source implementation of the Adobe Flash API,[72] supports importing SWF assets.[100]

Lightspark is a free and open-source SWF player that supports most of ActionScript 3.0 and has a Mozilla-compatible plug-in.[101] It will fall back on Gnash, a free SWF player supporting ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0 (AVM1) code. Lightspark supports OpenGL-based rendering for 3D content. The player is also compatible with H.264 Flash videos on YouTube.

Gnash aimed to create a software player and browser plugin replacement for the Adobe Flash Player. Gnash can play SWF files up to version 7, and 80% of ActionScript 2.0.[102] Gnash runs on Windows, Linux and other platforms for the 32-bit, 64-bit, and other operating systems, but development has slowed significantly in recent years.

Shumway was an open source Flash Player released by Mozilla in November 2012. It was built in JavaScript and is thus compatible with modern web browsers.[103][104][105] In early October 2013, Shumway was included by default in the Firefox nightly branch.[106] Shumway rendered Flash contents by translating contents inside Flash files to HTML5 elements, and running an ActionScript interpreter in JavaScript.[107] It supported both AVM1 and AVM2, and ActionScript versions 1, 2, and 3.[108] Development of Shumway ceased in early 2016.[109]

In the same year that Shumway was abandoned, work began on Ruffle, a flash emulator written in Rust. It also runs in web browsers, by compiling down to WebAssembly and using HTML5 Canvas.[110] In 2020, the Internet Archive added support for emulating SWF by adding Ruffle to its emulation scheme.[111] As of March 2023, Ruffle states that it supports 95% of the AS1/2 language and 73% of the AS1/2 APIs, but does not correctly run most AS3 (AVM2) applications.[112]

Availability

Desktop computers

Adobe Flash Player

Main article: Adobe Flash Player § Availability

Adobe Flash Player is currently only supported with the enterprise[1][2][4] and China[5] variants, it has been deprecated everywhere else.[6]

Adobe Flash Player is available in four flavors:

  • ActiveX-based Plug-in
  • NPAPI-based Plug-in
  • PPAPI-based Plug-in
  • Projector

The ActiveX version is an ActiveX control for use in Internet Explorer and any other Windows applications that support ActiveX technology. The Plug-in versions are available for browsers supporting either NPAPI or PPAPI plug-ins on Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux. The projector version is a standalone player that can open SWF files directly.[113]

Adobe AIR

Main article: Adobe AIR § Platforms

Adobe AIR shares some code with Adobe Flash Player and essentially embeds it.

Mobile devices

Adobe Flash Player

Adobe Flash Player was previously available for a variety of mobile operating systems, including Android (between versions 2.2)[114] and 4.0.4[115]., Pocket PC/Windows CE, QNX (e.g., on BlackBerry PlayBook), Symbian, Palm OS, and webOS (since version 2.0[116]). Flash Player for smartphones was originally made available to handset manufacturers at the end of 2009.[117] In November 2011, Adobe announced the withdrawal of support for Flash Player on mobile devices.[118]

In 2011 Adobe reaffirmed its commitment to "aggressively contribute" to HTML5.[119][120] Adobe announced the end of Flash for mobile platforms or TV, instead focusing on HTML5 for browser content and Adobe AIR for the various mobile application stores[121][122][123][124] and described it as "the beginning of the end".[125] BlackBerry LTD (formerly known as RIM) announced that it would continue to develop Flash Player for the PlayBook.[126]

There is no Adobe Flash Player for iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch). However, Flash content can be made to run on iOS devices in a variety of ways:

  • Flash content can be bundled inside an Adobe AIR app, which will then run on iOS devices. (Apple did not allow this for a while, but they relaxed those restrictions in September 2010.[127])
  • If the content is Flash video being served by Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5, the server will translate and send the video as HTTP Dynamic Streaming or HTTP Live Streaming, both of which can be played by iOS devices.[128]
  • Some specialized mobile browsers manage to accommodate Flash via streaming content from the cloud directly to a user's device. Some examples are Photon Browser[129] and Puffin Web Browser.[130]

The mobile version of Internet Explorer for Windows Phone cannot play Flash content;[131] however, Flash support is still present on the tablet version of Windows.[132]

Adobe AIR

Main article: Adobe AIR

AIR is a cross-platform runtime system for developing applications for mobile devices running Android (ARM Cortex-A8 and above)[133] and Apple iOS.[134]

Adobe Flash Lite

Main article: Adobe Flash Lite

Adobe Flash Lite is a lightweight version of Adobe Flash Player intended for mobile phones[135][self-published source?] and other portable electronic devices like Chumby and iRiver.

Alternatives on the web

For a list of non-web alternative players, see § Open source.

OpenFL

Main article: OpenFL

OpenFL is an open-source software framework that mirrors the Adobe Flash API. It allows developers to build a single application against the OpenFL APIs, and simultaneously target multiple platforms including iOS, Android, HTML5 (choice of Canvas, WebGL, SVG or DOM), Windows, macOS, Linux, WebAssembly, Flash, AIR, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, Wii U, TiVo, Raspberry Pi, and Node.js.[136] OpenFL mirrors the Flash API for graphical operations. OpenFL applications can be written in Haxe, JavaScript (EcmaScript 5 or 6+), or TypeScript.[137]

More than 500 video games have been developed with OpenFL,[138] including the BAFTA-award-winning game Papers, Please, Rymdkapsel, Lightbot, and Madden NFL Mobile.

HTML5

Main article: Comparison of HTML5 and Flash

HTML5 is often cited as an alternative to Adobe Flash technology usage on web pages. Adobe released a tool that converts Flash to HTML5,[139] and in June 2011, Google released an experimental tool that does the same.[140][141] In January 2015, YouTube defaulted to HTML5 players to better support more devices.[142]

Flash to HTML5

The following tools allow converting Flash content to HTML5:

  • Adobe Edge Animate was designed to produce HTML5 animations directly.[143]
  • Adobe Animate now allows Flash animations to be published into HTML5 content directly.
  • Google Swiffy was a web-based tool developed by Google that converts SWF files into HTML5, using SVG for graphics and JavaScript for animation.
  • Adobe Wallaby was a converter developed by Adobe.[144]
  • CreateJS is a library that while available separately was also adopted by Adobe as a replacement for Wallaby in CS6. Unlike Wallaby, which was a standalone program, the "Toolkit for CreateJS" only works as a plug-in inside Flash Professional; it generates output for the HTML5 canvas, animated with JavaScript.[145][146] Around December 2013, the toolkit was integrated directly into Flash Professional CC.[147][148]

The following tools run Flash content in an HTML5-enabled browser, but do not convert to a HTML5 webpage:

Criticisms

Mobile support

Websites built with Adobe Flash will not function on most modern mobile devices running Google Android or iOS (iPhone, iPad). The only alternative is using HTML5 and responsive web design to build websites that support both desktop and mobile devices.

However, Flash is still used to build mobile games using Adobe AIR. Such games will not work in mobile web browsers but must be installed via the appropriate app store.

Vendor lock-in

See also: Vendor lock-in

The reliance on Adobe for decoding Flash makes its use on the World Wide Web a concern—the completeness of its public specifications are debated, and no complete implementation of Flash is publicly available in source code form with a license that permits reuse. Generally, public specifications are what makes a format re-implementable (see future proofing data storage), and reusable codebases can be ported to new platforms without the endorsement of the format creator.

Adobe's restrictions on the use of the SWF/FLV specifications were lifted in February 2009 (see Adobe's Open Screen Project). However, despite efforts of projects like Gnash, Swfdec, and Lightspark, a complete free Flash player is yet to be seen, as of September 2011. For example, Gnash cannot use SWF v10 yet.[150] Notably, Gnash was listed on the Free Software Foundation's high priority list, from at least 2007, to its removal in January 2017.[151]

Notable advocates of free software, open standards, and the World Wide Web have warned against the use of Flash:

The founder of Mozilla Europe, Tristan Nitot, stated in 2008:[152]

Companies building websites should beware of proprietary rich-media technologies like Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight. (...) You're producing content for your users and there's someone in the middle deciding whether users should see your content.

Representing open standards, inventor of CSS and co-author of HTML5, Håkon Wium Lie explained in a Google tech talk of 2007, entitled "the <video> element", the proposal of Theora as the format for HTML5 video:[153]

I believe very strongly, that we need to agree on some kind of baseline video format if [the video element] is going to succeed. Flash is today the baseline format on the web. The problem with Flash is that it's not an open standard.

Representing the free software movement, Richard Stallman stated in a speech in 2004 that:[154] "The use of Flash in websites is a major problem for our community."

Accessibility and usability

Usability consultant Jakob Nielsen published an Alertbox in 2000 entitled, Flash: 99% Bad, stating that "Flash tends to degrade websites for three reasons: it encourages design abuse, it breaks with the Web's fundamental interaction principles, and it distracts attention from the site's core value."[155] Some problems have been at least partially fixed since Nielsen's complaints: text size can be controlled using full page zoom and it has been possible for authors to include alternative text in Flash since Flash Player 6.

Flash blocking in web browsers

 
Some websites rely heavily on Flash and become unusable without Flash Player, or with Flash blocked.

Flash content is usually embedded using the object or embed HTML element.[156] A web browser that does not fully implement one of these elements displays the replacement text, if supplied by the web page. Often, a plugin is required for the browser to fully implement these elements, though some users cannot or will not install it.

Since Flash can be used to produce content (such as advertisements) that some users find obnoxious or take a large amount of bandwidth to download, some web browsers, by default, do not play Flash content until the user clicks on it, e.g. Konqueror, K-Meleon.

Most current browsers have a feature to block plugins, playing one only when the user clicks it. Opera versions since 10.5 feature native Flash blocking. Opera Turbo requires the user to click to play Flash content, and the browser also allows the user to enable this option permanently. Both Chrome[157] and Firefox[158] have an option to enable "click to play plugins". Equivalent "Flash blocker" extensions are also available for many popular browsers: Firefox has Flashblock and NoScript, Internet Explorer has Foxie, which contains a number of features, one of them named Flashblock. WebKit-based browsers under macOS, such as Apple's Safari, have ClickToFlash.[159] In June 2015, Google announced that Chrome will "pause" advertisements and "non-central" Flash content by default.[160]

Firefox (from version 46) rewrites old Flash-only YouTube embed code into YouTube's modern embedded player that is capable of using either HTML5 or Flash.[161] Such embed code is used by non-YouTube sites to embed YouTube's videos, and can still be encountered, for example, on old blogs and forums.

However, there are ways to pass this error in absence of flash player by deleting the validation code in HTML. This also depends on browser vision.

Security

See also: Adobe Flash Player § Security, and Browser security § Plugins and extensions

For many years Adobe Flash Player's security record[162] has led many security experts to recommend against installing the player, or to block Flash content.[163][164] The US-CERT has recommended blocking Flash,[165] and security researcher Charlie Miller recommended "not to install Flash";[166] however, for people still using Flash, Intego recommended that users get trusted updates "only directly from the vendor that publishes them."[167] Adobe Flash Player has over 1078 CVE entries,[168] of which over 842 lead to arbitrary code execution, and past vulnerabilities have enabled spying via web cameras.[169][170][171][172] Security experts have long predicted the demise of Flash, saying that with the rise of HTML5 "...the need for browser plugins such as Flash is diminishing".[173]

Active moves by third parties to limit the risk began with Steve Jobs in 2010 saying that Apple would not allow Flash on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad – citing abysmal security as one reason.[174] Flash often used the ability to dynamically change parts of the runtime on languages on OSX to improve their own performance, but caused general instability. In July 2015, a series of newly discovered vulnerabilities resulted in Facebook's chief security officer, Alex Stamos, issuing a call to Adobe to discontinue the software entirely[175] and the Mozilla Firefox web browser, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari to blacklist all earlier versions of Flash Player.[176][177][178]

Flash cookies

Main article: Local shared object

Like the HTTP cookie, a flash cookie (also known as a "Local Shared Object") can be used to save application data. Flash cookies are not shared across domains. An August 2009 study by the Ashkan Soltani and a team of researchers at UC Berkeley found that 50% of websites using Flash were also employing flash cookies, yet privacy policies rarely disclosed them, and user controls for privacy preferences were lacking.[179] Most browsers' cache and history suppress or delete functions did not affect Flash Player's writing Local Shared Objects to its own cache in version 10.2 and earlier, at which point the user community was much less aware of the existence and function of Flash cookies than HTTP cookies.[180] Thus, users with those versions, having deleted HTTP cookies and purged browser history files and caches, may believe that they have purged all tracking data from their computers when in fact Flash browsing history remains. Adobe's own Flash Website Storage Settings panel, a submenu of Adobe's Flash Settings Manager web application, and other editors and toolkits can manage settings for and delete Flash Local Shared Objects.[181]

See also

Explanatory footnotes

  1. ^ FLV and F4V September 23, 2010, at the Wayback Machine. F4V is based on the ISO base media file format standard, available as a free download at http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/index.html .

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External links

  • Official website

April 09, 2023
adobe, flash, this, article, about, multimedia, software, platform, application, animation, software, adobe, animate, player, player, formerly, macromedia, flash, futuresplash, multimedia, software, platform, used, production, animations, rich, applications, d. This article is about the multimedia software platform For the application animation software see Adobe Animate For the player see Adobe Flash Player Adobe Flash formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash is a multimedia software platform used for production of animations rich web applications desktop applications mobile apps mobile games and embedded web browser video players Flash displays text vector graphics and raster graphics to provide animations video games and applications It allows streaming of audio and video and can capture mouse keyboard microphone and camera input Adobe FlashDeveloper s Harman 2021 present for enterprise users 1 2 3 4 Zhongcheng 2017 present in China 5 Adobe Inc 2005 2020 Macromedia 1996 2005 FutureWave 1993 1996 Target platform s Web browsers iOS via third party software Android Windows macOS LinuxEditor softwareAdobe AnimateFlash BuilderFlashDevelopPowerflasher FDTFlash CatalystScaleformPlayer softwareFlash PlayerAdobe AIROpenFLScaleformGnashLightsparkRuffleFormat s SWFFLVFLAProgramming language s ActionScriptApplication s AnimationBrowser gamesrich web appsDesktop appsMobile appsMobile gamesConsole gamesPC gamesStatusActive only for enterprise users and all users in China discontinued everywhere else i e outside ChinaLicenseProprietaryWebsiteadobe com flashArtists may produce Flash graphics and animations using Adobe Animate formerly known as Adobe Flash Professional Software developers may produce applications and video games using Adobe Flash Builder FlashDevelop Flash Catalyst or any text editor combined with the Apache Flex SDK End users view Flash content via Flash Player for web browsers Adobe AIR for desktop or mobile apps or third party players such as Scaleform for video games Adobe Flash Player which is available on Microsoft Windows macOS and Linux enables end users to view Flash content using web browsers Adobe Flash Lite enabled viewing Flash content on older smartphones but since has been discontinued and superseded by Adobe AIR The ActionScript programming language allows the development of interactive animations video games web applications desktop applications and mobile applications Programmers can implement Flash software using an IDE such as Adobe Animate Adobe Flash Builder Adobe Director FlashDevelop and Powerflasher FDT Adobe AIR enables full featured desktop and mobile applications to be developed with Flash and published for Windows macOS Android iOS Xbox One PlayStation 4 Wii U and Nintendo Switch Flash was initially used to create fully interactive websites but this approach was phased out with the introduction of HTML5 Instead Flash found a niche as the dominant platform for online multimedia content particularly for browser games Following an open letter written by Steve Jobs in 2010 stating that he would not approve the use of Flash on Apple s iOS devices due to numerous security flaws use of Flash declined as Adobe transitioned to the Adobe Air platform The Flash Player was deprecated in 2017 and officially discontinued at the end of 2020 for all users outside China as well as non enterprise users 6 with many web browsers and operating systems scheduled to remove the Flash Player software around the same time Adobe continues to develop Adobe Animate which supports web standards such as HTML5 instead of the Flash format 7 Contents 1 Applications 1 1 Websites 1 2 Rich Web Applications 1 3 Video games 1 4 Film and animation 2 History 2 1 FutureWave 2 2 Macromedia 2 3 Adobe 2 4 Open Source 2 4 1 Open Screen Project 2 5 End of life 2 5 1 Post EOL support 2 6 Content preservation projects 3 Format 3 1 FLA 3 2 SWF 3 3 3D 3 4 Flash Video 3 5 Flash Audio 3 6 ActionScript 3 7 Specifications 4 Animation tools 4 1 Official tools 4 2 Third party tools 5 Programming tools 5 1 Official tools 5 2 Third party tools 6 Players 6 1 Proprietary 6 2 Open source 7 Availability 7 1 Desktop computers 7 1 1 Adobe Flash Player 7 1 2 Adobe AIR 7 2 Mobile devices 7 2 1 Adobe Flash Player 7 2 2 Adobe AIR 7 3 Adobe Flash Lite 8 Alternatives on the web 8 1 OpenFL 8 2 HTML5 8 3 Flash to HTML5 9 Criticisms 9 1 Mobile support 9 2 Vendor lock in 9 3 Accessibility and usability 9 4 Flash blocking in web browsers 9 5 Security 9 6 Flash cookies 10 See also 11 Explanatory footnotes 12 References 13 External linksApplications EditWebsites Edit In the early 2000s Flash was widely installed on desktop computers and was often used to display interactive web pages and online games and to play video and audio content 8 In 2005 YouTube was founded by former PayPal employees and it used Adobe Flash Player as a means to display compressed video content on the web 8 Between 2000 and 2010 numerous businesses used Flash based websites to launch new products or to create interactive company portals 9 Notable users include Nike Hewlett Packard more commonly known as HP Nokia General Electric World Wildlife Fund HBO Cartoon Network Disney and Motorola 9 10 After Adobe introduced hardware accelerated 3D for Flash Stage3D Flash websites saw a growth of 3D content for product demonstrations and virtual tours 11 12 In 2007 YouTube offered videos in HTML5 format to support the iPhone and iPad which did not support Flash Player 8 After a controversy with Apple Adobe stopped developing Flash Player for Mobile focusing its efforts on Adobe AIR applications and HTML5 animation 8 In 2015 Google introduced Google Swiffy a tool that converted Flash animation to HTML5 which Google used to automatically convert Flash web ads for mobile devices 13 In 2016 Google discontinued Swiffy and its support 14 In 2015 YouTube switched to HTML5 technology on most devices by default 15 16 17 however YouTube supported the Flash based video player for older web browsers and devices until 2017 18 Rich Web Applications Edit Main article Rich web application After Flash 5 introduced ActionScript in 2000 developers combined the visual and programming capabilities of Flash to produce interactive experiences and applications for the Web 19 Such Web based applications eventually became known as Rich Internet Applications 19 and later Rich Web Applications In 2004 Macromedia Flex was released and specifically targeted the application development market 19 Flex introduced new user interface components advanced data visualization components data remoting and a modern IDE Flash Builder 19 20 Flex competed with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML AJAX and Microsoft Silverlight during its tenure 19 Flex was upgraded to support integration with remote data sources using AMF BlazeDS Adobe LiveCycle Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and others 21 Between 2006 and 2016 the Speedtest net web service conducted over 9 0 billion speed tests with a utility built with Adobe Flash 22 23 In 2016 the service shifted to HTML5 due to the decreasing availability of Adobe Flash Player on PCs 24 Developers could create Flash web applications and rich web applications in ActionScript 3 0 programming language with IDEs including Adobe Flash Builder FlashDevelop and Powerflasher FDT Flex applications were typically built using Flex frameworks such as PureMVC 21 Video games Edit source source source source source source source source Screenshots and footage of Flash games QWOP Solipskier and Hundreds Flash video games were popular on the Internet with portals like Newgrounds Kongregate and Armor Games dedicated to hosting Flash based games Many Flash games were developed by individuals or groups of friends due to the simplicity of the software 25 Popular Flash games include Farmville Alien Hominid QWOP and Club Penguin 26 27 Adobe introduced various technologies to help build video games including Adobe AIR to release games for desktop or mobile platforms Adobe Scout to improve performance CrossBridge to convert C based games to run in Flash and Stage3D to support GPU accelerated video games 3D frameworks like Away3D and Flare3D simplified creation of 3D content for Flash citation needed Adobe AIR allows the creation of Flash based mobile games which may be published to the Google Play and Apple app stores 28 29 30 Flash is also used to build interfaces and HUDs for 3D video games using Scaleform GFx a technology that renders Flash content within non Flash video games Scaleform is supported by more than 10 major video game engines including Unreal Engine and UDK CryEngine and PhyreEngine and has been used to provide 3D interfaces for more than 150 major video game titles since its launch in 2003 citation needed Film and animation Edit Main articles List of Flash animated films and List of Flash animated television series Notable users of Flash include DHX Media Vancouver for productions including Pound Puppies Littlest Pet Shop and My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic Fresh TV for Total Drama Nelvana for 6teen and Clone High Williams Street for Metalocalypse and Squidbillies Nickelodeon Animation Studio for El Tigre The Adventures of Manny Rivera Starz Media for Wow Wow Wubbzy among others citation needed History EditFutureWave Edit The precursor to Flash was SmartSketch a product published by FutureWave Software in 1993 The company was founded by Charlie Jackson Jonathan Gay and Michelle Welsh 31 32 33 34 SmartSketch was a vector drawing application for pen computers running the PenPoint OS 35 36 When PenPoint failed in the marketplace SmartSketch was ported to Microsoft Windows and Mac OS 32 37 As the Internet became more popular FutureWave realized the potential for a vector based web animation tool that might challenge Macromedia Shockwave technology 31 32 In 1995 FutureWave modified SmartSketch by adding frame by frame animation features and released this new product as FutureSplash Animator on Macintosh and PC 31 32 38 39 FutureWave approached Adobe Systems with an offer to sell them FutureSplash in 1995 but Adobe turned down the offer at that time 32 Microsoft wanted to create an online TV network MSN 2 0 and adopted FutureSplash animated content as a central part of it 32 Disney Online used FutureSplash animations for their subscription based service Disney s Daily Blast 31 32 Fox Broadcasting Company launched The Simpsons using FutureSplash 32 Macromedia Edit In November 1996 FutureSplash was acquired by Macromedia and Macromedia re branded and released FutureSplash Animator as Macromedia Flash 1 0 Flash was a two part system a graphics and animation editor known as Macromedia Flash and a player known as Macromedia Flash Player 40 FutureSplash Animator was an animation tool originally developed for pen based computing devices Due to the small size of the FutureSplash Viewer it was particularly suited for download on the Web Macromedia distributed Flash Player as a free browser plugin in order to quickly gain market share By 2005 more computers worldwide had Flash Player installed than any other Web media format including Java QuickTime RealNetworks and Windows Media Player 41 Macromedia upgraded the Flash system between 1996 and 1999 adding MovieClips Actions the precursor to ActionScript Alpha transparency and other features As Flash matured Macromedia s focus shifted from marketing it as a graphics and media tool to promoting it as a Web application platform adding scripting and data access capabilities to the player while attempting to retain its small footprint citation needed In 2000 the first major version of ActionScript was developed and released with Flash 5 Actionscript 2 0 was released with Flash MX 2004 and supported object oriented programming improved UI components and other programming features The last version of Flash released by Macromedia was Flash 8 which focused on graphical upgrades such as filters blur drop shadow etc blend modes similar to Adobe Photoshop and advanced features for FLV video citation needed Adobe Edit On December 3 2005 Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia 42 along with the entire Macromedia product line including Flash Dreamweaver Director Shockwave Fireworks and Authorware citation needed In 2007 Adobe s first version release was Adobe Flash CS3 Professional the ninth major version of Flash It introduced the ActionScript 3 0 programming language which supported modern programming practices and enabled business applications to be developed with Flash Adobe Flex Builder built on Eclipse targeted the enterprise application development market and was also released the same year Flex Builder included the Flex SDK a set of components that included charting advanced UI and data services Flex Data Services citation needed In 2008 Adobe released the tenth version of Flash Adobe Flash CS4 Flash 10 improved animation capabilities within the Flash editor adding a motion editor panel similar to Adobe After Effects inverse kinematics bones basic 3D object animation object based animation and other text and graphics features Flash Player 10 included an in built 3D engine without GPU acceleration that allowed basic object transformations in 3D space position rotation scaling citation needed Also in 2008 Adobe released the first version of Adobe Integrated Runtime later re branded as Adobe AIR a runtime engine that replaced Flash Player and provided additional capabilities to the ActionScript 3 0 language to build desktop and mobile applications With AIR developers could access the file system the user s files and folders and connected devices such as a joystick gamepad and sensors for the first time citation needed In 2011 Adobe Flash Player 11 was released and with it the first version of Stage3D allowing GPU accelerated 3D rendering for Flash applications and games on desktop platforms such as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X 43 Adobe further improved 3D capabilities from 2011 to 2013 adding support for 3D rendering on Android and iOS platforms alpha channels compressed textures texture atlases and other features 44 45 Adobe AIR was upgraded to support 64 bit computers and to allow developers to add additional functionality to the AIR runtime using AIR Native Extensions ANE In May 2014 Adobe announced that Adobe AIR was used in over 100 000 unique applications and had over 1 billion installations logged worldwide 46 Adobe AIR was voted the Best Mobile Application Development product at the Consumer Electronics Show on two consecutive years CES 2014 and CES 2015 47 48 In 2016 Adobe renamed Flash Professional the primary authoring software for Flash content to Adobe Animate to reflect its growing use for authoring HTML5 content in favor of Flash content 49 Open Source Edit Adobe has taken steps to reduce or eliminate Flash licensing costs For instance the SWF file format documentation is provided free of charge 50 after they relaxed the requirement of accepting a non disclosure agreement to view it in 2008 51 Adobe also created the Open Screen Project which removes licensing fees and opens data protocols for Flash Adobe has also open sourced many components relating to Flash In 2006 the ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 AVM2 which implements ActionScript 3 was donated as open source to Mozilla Foundation to begin work on the Tamarin virtual machine that would implement the ECMAScript 4 language standard with the help of the Mozilla community 52 It was released under the terms of a MPL GPL LGPL tri license and includes the specification for the ActionScript bytecode format Tamarin Project jointly managed by Mozilla and Adobe Systems 53 It is now considered obsolete by Mozilla In 2011 the Adobe Flex Framework was donated as open source to the Apache Software Foundation and rebranded as Apache Flex 54 Some saw this move as Adobe abandoning Flex and stepping away from the Flash Platform as a whole 55 56 Sources from Apache say that Enterprise application development is no longer a focus at Adobe At least as Flash is concerned Adobe is concentrating on games and video 55 57 and they conclude that Flex Innovation is Exploding 57 The donated source code included a partly developed AS3 compiler dubbed Falcon and the BlazeDS set of technologies 56 57 In 2013 the CrossBridge C cross compilation toolset was open sourced by Adobe and released on GitHub 58 59 The project was formerly termed Alchemy and Flash Runtime C Compiler and targeted the game development market to enable C video games to run in Adobe Flash Player 60 Adobe has not been willing to make complete source code of the Flash Player available for free software development and even though free and open source alternatives such as Shumway and Gnash have been built they are no longer under active development 61 Open Screen Project Edit On May 1 2008 Adobe announced the Open Screen Project with the intent of providing a consistent application interface across devices such as personal computers mobile devices and consumer electronics 62 When the project was announced seven goals were outlined the abolition of licensing fees for Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR the removal of restrictions on the use of the Shockwave Flash SWF and Flash Video FLV file formats the publishing of application programming interfaces for porting Flash to new devices and the publishing of The Flash Cast protocol and Action Message Format AMF which let Flash applications receive information from remote databases 62 As of February 2009 update the specifications removing the restrictions on the use of SWF and FLV F4V specs have been published 63 The Flash Cast protocol now known as the Mobile Content Delivery Protocol and AMF protocols have also been made available 63 with AMF available as an open source implementation BlazeDS The list of mobile device providers who have joined the project includes Palm Motorola and Nokia 64 who together with Adobe have announced a 10 million Open Screen Project fund 65 End of life Edit See also Adobe Flash Player End of life One of Flash s primary uses on the Internet when it was first released was for building fully immersive interactive websites These were typically highly creative site designs that provided more flexibility over what the current HTML standards could provide as well as operate over dial up connections 66 However these sites limited accessibility by breaking the Back Button dumping visitors out of the Flash experience entirely by returning them to whatever page they had been on prior to first arriving at the site Fully Flash run sites fell out of favor for more strategic use of Flash plugins for video and other interactive features among standard HTML conventions corresponding with the availability of HTML features like cascading style sheets in the mid 00 s 67 At the same time this also led to Flash being used for new apps including video games and animations 68 Precursors to YouTube but featuring user generated Flash animations and games such as Newgrounds became popular destinations further helping to spread the use of Flash 66 Toward the end of the millennium the Wireless Application Protocol WAP was released corresponding with development of Dynamic HTML Fifteen years later WAP had largely been replaced by full capability implementations and the HTML5 standard included more support for interactive and video elements Support for Flash in these mobile browsers was not included In 2010 Apple s Steve Jobs famously wrote Thoughts on Flash an open letter to Adobe criticizing the closed nature of the Flash platform and the inherent security problems with the application to explain why Flash was not supported on iOS 69 70 Adobe created the Adobe AIR environment as a means to appease Apple s concerns and spent time legally fighting Apple over terms of its App Store to allow AIR to be used on the iOS While Adobe eventually won allowing for other third party development environments to get access to the iOS Apple s decision to block Flash itself was considered the death blow to the Flash application 68 In November 2011 about a year after Jobs open letter Adobe announced it would no longer be developing Flash and advised developers to switch to HTML5 71 In 2011 Adobe ended support for Flash on Android 71 Adobe stated that Flash platform was transitioning to Adobe AIR and OpenFL a multi target open source implementation of the Flash API 72 In 2015 Adobe rebranded Flash Professional the main Flash authoring environment as Adobe Animate to emphasize its expanded support for HTML5 authoring and stated that it would encourage content creators to build with new web standards rather than use Flash 73 In July 2017 Adobe deprecated Flash and announced its End Of Life EOL at the end of 2020 and will cease support distribution and security updates for Flash Player 6 With Flash s EOL announced many browsers took steps to gradually restrict Flash content caution users before launching it eventually blocking all content without an option to play it By January 2021 all major browsers were blocking all Flash content unconditionally Only IE11 niche browser forks and some browsers built for China plan to continue support Furthermore excluding the China variant of Flash Flash execution software has a built in kill switch which prevents it from playing Flash after January 12 2021 74 In January 2021 Microsoft released an optional update KB4577586 which removes Flash Player from Windows in July 2021 this update was pushed out as a security update and applied automatically to all remaining systems 75 Post EOL support Edit Main article Adobe Flash Player Post EOL support Adobe Flash will still be supported in China and worldwide on some specialized enterprise platforms beyond 2020 5 Content preservation projects Edit As early as 2014 around the same time that Adobe began encouraging Flash developers to transition their works to HTML5 standards others began efforts to preserve existing Flash content through emulation of Flash in open standards While some Flash applications were utilitarian several applications had been shown to be experimental art while others had laid the foundation of independent video game development 76 An early project was Mozilla s Shumway an open source project that attempted to emulate the Flash standard in HTML5 but the project was shuttered as the team found that more developers were switching to HTML5 than seeking to keep their content in Flash coupled with the difficulties in assuring full compatibility Google had developed the Swiffy application released in 2014 to convert Flash applications to HTML5 compatible scripts for viewing on mobile devices but it was shut down in 2016 76 Closer to Flash s EOL date in 2020 there were more concentrated efforts simply to preserve existing Flash applications including websites video games and animations beyond Flash s EOL 68 77 78 The Internet Archive introduced Ruffle and Emularity Flash emulators to emulate Flash games and animations without the security holes in November 2020 opening a new collection for creators and users to save and preserve Flash content 79 80 By January 2020 the Flashpoint project collected more than 38 000 Flash applications excluding those that were commercial products and offered as a large freely available archive for users to download 81 82 Kongregate one of the larger sites that offered Flash games has been working with the Strong Museum of Play to preserve its games 76 Format EditFLA Edit Flash source files are in the FLA format and contain graphics and animation as well as embedded assets such as bitmap images audio files and FLV video files The Flash source file format was a proprietary format and Adobe Animate and Adobe Flash Pro were the only available authoring tools capable of editing such files Flash source files fla may be compiled into Flash movie files swf using Adobe Animate Note that FLA files can be edited but output swf files cannot SWF Edit Main article SWF Flash movie files were in the SWF format traditionally called ShockWave Flash movies Flash movies or Flash applications usually have a swf file extension and may be used in the form of a web page plug in strictly played in a standalone Flash Player or incorporated into a self executing Projector movie with the exe extension in Microsoft Windows Flash Video files spec 1 have a flv file extension and are either used from within swf files or played through a flv aware player such as VLC or QuickTime and Windows Media Player with external codecs added The use of vector graphics combined with program code allows Flash files to be smaller and thus allows streams to use less bandwidth than the corresponding bitmaps or video clips For content in a single format such as just text video or audio other alternatives may provide better performance and consume less CPU power than the corresponding Flash movie for example when using transparency or making large screen updates such as photographic or text fades In addition to a vector rendering engine the Flash Player includes a virtual machine called the ActionScript Virtual Machine AVM for scripting interactivity at run time with video MP3 based audio and bitmap graphics As of Flash Player 8 it offered two video codecs On2 Technologies VP6 and Sorenson Spark and run time JPEG Progressive JPEG PNG GIF and DWG AutoCAD Drawing file WMV Windows Metafile capability 3D Edit Main article Stage3D Flash Player 11 introduced a full 3D shader API called Stage3D which is fairly similar to WebGL 83 84 Stage3D enables GPU accelerated rendering of 3D graphics within Flash games and applications and has been used to build Angry Birds and a couple of other notable games Various 3D frameworks have been built for Flash using Stage3D such as Away3D 4 84 CopperCube 85 Flare3D 86 and Starling 87 Professional game engines like Unreal Engine 88 89 and Unity also export Flash versions which use Stage3D to render 3D graphics Flash Video Edit Main article Flash Video Virtually all browser plugins for video are free of charge and cross platform including Adobe s offering of Flash Video which was introduced with Flash version 6 Flash Video had been a popular choice for websites due to the large installed user base and programmability of Flash In 2010 Apple publicly criticized Adobe Flash including its implementation of video playback for not taking advantage of hardware acceleration one reason Flash was not to be found on Apple s mobile devices Soon after Apple s criticism Adobe demoed and released a beta version of Flash 10 1 which used available GPU hardware acceleration even on a Mac Flash 10 2 beta released December 2010 added hardware acceleration for the whole video rendering pipeline Flash Player supports two distinct modes of video playback and hardware accelerated video decoding may not be used for older video content Such content causes excessive CPU usage compared to comparable content played with other players Software Rendered Video Flash Player supports software rendered video since version 6 Such video supports vector animations displayed above the video content This obligation may depending on graphic APIs exposed by the operating system prohibit using a video overlay like a traditional multimedia player would use with the consequence that color space conversion and scaling must happen in software 90 Hardware Accelerated Video Flash Player supports hardware accelerated video playback since version 10 2 for H 264 F4V and FLV video formats Such video is displayed above all Flash content and takes advantage of video codec chipsets installed on the user s device Developers must specifically use the StageVideo technology within Flash Player in order for hardware decoding to be enabled Flash Player internally uses technologies such as DirectX Video Acceleration and OpenGL to do so In tests done by Ars Technica in 2008 and 2009 Adobe Flash Player performed better on Windows than Mac OS X and Linux with the same hardware 91 92 Performance has later improved for the latter two on Mac OS X with Flash Player 10 1 93 and on Linux with Flash Player 11 94 Flash Audio Edit Flash Audio is most commonly encoded in MP3 or AAC Advanced Audio Coding however it can also use ADPCM Nellymoser Nellymoser Asao Codec and Speex audio codecs Flash allows sample rates of 11 22 and 44 1 kHz It cannot have a 48 kHz audio sample rate which is the standard TV and DVD sample rate On August 20 2007 Adobe announced on its blog that with Update 3 of Flash Player 9 Flash Video will also implement some parts of the MPEG 4 international standards 95 Specifically Flash Player will work with video compressed in H 264 MPEG 4 Part 10 audio compressed using AAC MPEG 4 Part 3 the F4V MP4 MPEG 4 Part 14 M4V M4A 3GP and MOV multimedia container formats 3GPP Timed Text specification MPEG 4 Part 17 which is a standardized subtitle format and partial parsing capability for the ilst atom which is the ID3 equivalent iTunes uses to store metadata MPEG 4 Part 2 and H 263 will not work in F4V file format Adobe also announced that it will be gradually moving away from the FLV format to the standard ISO base media file format MPEG 4 Part 12 owing to functional limits with the FLV structure when streaming H 264 The final release of the Flash Player implementing some parts of MPEG 4 standards had become available in Fall 2007 96 Adobe Flash Player 10 1 does not have acoustic echo cancellation unlike the VoIP offerings of Skype and Google Voice making this and earlier versions of Flash less suitable for group calling or meetings Flash Player 10 3 Beta incorporates acoustic echo cancellation ActionScript Edit Main articles ActionScript and ActionScript Virtual Machine Flash programs use ActionScript programming language It is an enhanced superset of the ECMAScript programming language with a classical Java style class model rather than JavaScript s prototype model Specifications Edit In October 1998 Macromedia disclosed the Flash Version 3 Specification on its website It did this in response to many new and often semi open formats competing with SWF such as Xara s Flare and Sharp s Extended Vector Animation formats Several developers quickly created a C library for producing SWF In February 1999 MorphInk 99 was introduced the first third party program to create SWF files Macromedia also hired Middlesoft to create a freely available developers kit for the SWF file format versions 3 to 5 Macromedia made the Flash Files specifications for versions 6 and later available only under a non disclosure agreement but they are widely available from various sites In April 2006 the Flash SWF file format specification was released with details on the then newest version format Flash 8 Although still lacking specific information on the incorporated video compression formats On2 Sorenson Spark etc this new documentation covered all the new features offered in Flash v8 including new ActionScript commands expressive filter controls and so on The file format specification document is offered only to developers who agree to a license agreement that permits them to use the specifications only to develop programs that can export to the Flash file format The license does not allow the use of the specifications to create programs that can be used for playback of Flash files The Flash 9 specification was made available under similar restrictions 97 In June 2009 Adobe launched the Open Screen Project Adobe link which made the SWF specification available without restrictions Previously developers could not use the specification for making SWF compatible players but only for making SWF exporting authoring software The specification still omits information on codecs such as Sorenson Spark however 98 Animation tools EditOfficial tools Edit Main article Adobe Animate The Adobe Animate authoring program is primarily used to design graphics and animation and publish the same for websites web applications and video games The program also offers limited support for audio and video embedding and ActionScript scripting Adobe released Adobe LiveMotion designed to create interactive animation content and export it to a variety of formats including SWF LiveMotion failed to gain any notable user base specify In February 2003 Macromedia purchased Presedia which had developed a Flash authoring tool that automatically converted PowerPoint files into Flash Macromedia subsequently released the new product as Breeze which included many new enhancements Third party tools Edit Main article Comparison of vector graphics editors Various free and commercial software packages can output animations into the Flash SWF format including Ajax Animator aims to create a Flash development environment Alligator Flash Designer Amara Web Apple Keynote allows users to export presentations to Flash SWF animations CelAction2D Clash Express Animator KoolMoves KToon can edit vectors and generate SWF but its interface is very different from Macromedia s Anime Studio is a 2D animation software package specialized for character animation that creates Flash animations OpenOffice Impress Question Writer publishes its quizzes to Flash animations Salasaga Screencast and Screencam produces demos or tutorials by capturing the screen and generating a Flash animation of the same SWiSH Max is an animation editor with preset animation developed by an ex employee of Macromedia that can output Flash animations Synfig Toon Boom is a traditional animation tool that can output Flash animations Swift 3d for vector 3D rendering amp animation Toufee Vyond is a software as a service tool to create animated videos Xara Photo amp Graphic Designer can output Flash animationsThe Flash 4 Linux project was an initiative to develop an open source Linux application as an alternative to Adobe Animate Development plans included authoring capacity for 2D animation and tweening as well as outputting SWF file formats F4L evolved into an editor that was capable of authoring 2D animation and publishing of SWF files Flash 4 Linux was renamed UIRA UIRA intended to combine the resources and knowledge of the F4L project and the Qflash project both of which were Open Source applications that aimed to provide an alternative to the proprietary Adobe Flash Programming tools EditOfficial tools Edit Adobe provides a series of tools to develop software applications and video games for Flash Apache Flex SDK a free open source SDK to compile Flash based rich web applications from source code The Apache Flex ActionScript 3 0 compiler generates SWF files from ActionScript 3 files Flex was the primary ActionScript 3 compiler and was actively developed by Adobe before it was donated to Apache Software Foundation in 2011 Adobe Animate primarily used to design graphics and animation but supports ActionScript scripting and debugging Adobe Flash Builder enterprise application development amp debugging contains the Flex SDK with UI and charting components Adobe Scout a visual profiler to optimize the performance of Flash content CrossBridge a free SDK to cross compile C code to run in Flash Player Third party tools Edit Third party development tools have been created to assist developers in creating software applications and video games with Flash FlashDevelop is a free and open source Flash ActionScript IDE which includes a project manager and debugger for building applications on Flash Player and Adobe AIR Powerflasher FDT is a commercial ActionScript IDE similar to FlashDevelop Haxe is an open source high level object oriented programming language geared towards web content creation that can compile SWF files from Haxe programs As of 2012 Haxe can build programs for Flash Player that perform faster than the same application built with the Adobe Flex SDK compiler due to additional compiler optimizations supported in Haxe citation needed SWFTools specifically swfc is an open source ActionScript 3 0 compiler which generates SWF files from script files which includes SVG tags swfmill and MTASC also provide tools to create SWF files by compiling text ActionScript or XML files into Flash animations Ming library to create SWF files programmatically has interfaces for C PHP C Perl Python and Ruby It is able to import and export graphics from XML into SWF Players EditProprietary Edit Adobe Flash Player is the multimedia and application player originally developed by Macromedia and acquired by Adobe Systems It plays SWF files which can be created by Adobe Animate Apache Flex or a number of other Adobe Systems and 3rd party tools It has support for a scripting language called ActionScript which can be used to display Flash Video from an SWF file Scaleform GFx is a commercial alternative Flash player that features fully hardware accelerated 2D graphics rendering using the GPU Scaleform has high conformance with both Flash 10 ActionScript 3 99 and Flash 8 ActionScript 2 Scaleform GFx is a game development middleware solution that helps create graphical user interfaces or HUDs within 3D video games It does not work with web browsers IrfanView an image viewer uses Flash Player to display SWF files Open source Edit OpenFL a cross platform open source implementation of the Adobe Flash API 72 supports importing SWF assets 100 Lightspark is a free and open source SWF player that supports most of ActionScript 3 0 and has a Mozilla compatible plug in 101 It will fall back on Gnash a free SWF player supporting ActionScript 1 0 and 2 0 AVM1 code Lightspark supports OpenGL based rendering for 3D content The player is also compatible with H 264 Flash videos on YouTube Gnash aimed to create a software player and browser plugin replacement for the Adobe Flash Player Gnash can play SWF files up to version 7 and 80 of ActionScript 2 0 102 Gnash runs on Windows Linux and other platforms for the 32 bit 64 bit and other operating systems but development has slowed significantly in recent years Shumway was an open source Flash Player released by Mozilla in November 2012 It was built in JavaScript and is thus compatible with modern web browsers 103 104 105 In early October 2013 Shumway was included by default in the Firefox nightly branch 106 Shumway rendered Flash contents by translating contents inside Flash files to HTML5 elements and running an ActionScript interpreter in JavaScript 107 It supported both AVM1 and AVM2 and ActionScript versions 1 2 and 3 108 Development of Shumway ceased in early 2016 109 In the same year that Shumway was abandoned work began on Ruffle a flash emulator written in Rust It also runs in web browsers by compiling down to WebAssembly and using HTML5 Canvas 110 In 2020 the Internet Archive added support for emulating SWF by adding Ruffle to its emulation scheme 111 As of March 2023 Ruffle states that it supports 95 of the AS1 2 language and 73 of the AS1 2 APIs but does not correctly run most AS3 AVM2 applications 112 Availability EditDesktop computers Edit Adobe Flash Player Edit Main article Adobe Flash Player Availability Adobe Flash Player is currently only supported with the enterprise 1 2 4 and China 5 variants it has been deprecated everywhere else 6 Adobe Flash Player is available in four flavors ActiveX based Plug in NPAPI based Plug in PPAPI based Plug in ProjectorThe ActiveX version is an ActiveX control for use in Internet Explorer and any other Windows applications that support ActiveX technology The Plug in versions are available for browsers supporting either NPAPI or PPAPI plug ins on Microsoft Windows macOS and Linux The projector version is a standalone player that can open SWF files directly 113 Adobe AIR Edit Main article Adobe AIR Platforms Adobe AIR shares some code with Adobe Flash Player and essentially embeds it Mobile devices Edit Adobe Flash Player Edit Adobe Flash Player was previously available for a variety of mobile operating systems including Android between versions 2 2 114 and 4 0 4 115 Pocket PC Windows CE QNX e g on BlackBerry PlayBook Symbian Palm OS and webOS since version 2 0 116 Flash Player for smartphones was originally made available to handset manufacturers at the end of 2009 117 In November 2011 Adobe announced the withdrawal of support for Flash Player on mobile devices 118 In 2011 Adobe reaffirmed its commitment to aggressively contribute to HTML5 119 120 Adobe announced the end of Flash for mobile platforms or TV instead focusing on HTML5 for browser content and Adobe AIR for the various mobile application stores 121 122 123 124 and described it as the beginning of the end 125 BlackBerry LTD formerly known as RIM announced that it would continue to develop Flash Player for the PlayBook 126 There is no Adobe Flash Player for iOS devices iPhone iPad and iPod Touch However Flash content can be made to run on iOS devices in a variety of ways Flash content can be bundled inside an Adobe AIR app which will then run on iOS devices Apple did not allow this for a while but they relaxed those restrictions in September 2010 127 If the content is Flash video being served by Adobe Flash Media Server 4 5 the server will translate and send the video as HTTP Dynamic Streaming or HTTP Live Streaming both of which can be played by iOS devices 128 Some specialized mobile browsers manage to accommodate Flash via streaming content from the cloud directly to a user s device Some examples are Photon Browser 129 and Puffin Web Browser 130 The mobile version of Internet Explorer for Windows Phone cannot play Flash content 131 however Flash support is still present on the tablet version of Windows 132 Adobe AIR Edit Main article Adobe AIR AIR is a cross platform runtime system for developing applications for mobile devices running Android ARM Cortex A8 and above 133 and Apple iOS 134 Adobe Flash Lite Edit Main article Adobe Flash Lite Adobe Flash Lite is a lightweight version of Adobe Flash Player intended for mobile phones 135 self published source and other portable electronic devices like Chumby and iRiver Alternatives on the web EditFor a list of non web alternative players see Open source OpenFL Edit Main article OpenFL OpenFL is an open source software framework that mirrors the Adobe Flash API It allows developers to build a single application against the OpenFL APIs and simultaneously target multiple platforms including iOS Android HTML5 choice of Canvas WebGL SVG or DOM Windows macOS Linux WebAssembly Flash AIR PlayStation 4 PlayStation 3 PlayStation Vita Xbox One Wii U TiVo Raspberry Pi and Node js 136 OpenFL mirrors the Flash API for graphical operations OpenFL applications can be written in Haxe JavaScript EcmaScript 5 or 6 or TypeScript 137 More than 500 video games have been developed with OpenFL 138 including the BAFTA award winning game Papers Please Rymdkapsel Lightbot and Madden NFL Mobile HTML5 Edit Main article Comparison of HTML5 and Flash HTML5 is often cited as an alternative to Adobe Flash technology usage on web pages Adobe released a tool that converts Flash to HTML5 139 and in June 2011 Google released an experimental tool that does the same 140 141 In January 2015 YouTube defaulted to HTML5 players to better support more devices 142 Flash to HTML5 Edit The following tools allow converting Flash content to HTML5 Adobe Edge Animate was designed to produce HTML5 animations directly 143 Adobe Animate now allows Flash animations to be published into HTML5 content directly Google Swiffy was a web based tool developed by Google that converts SWF files into HTML5 using SVG for graphics and JavaScript for animation Adobe Wallaby was a converter developed by Adobe 144 CreateJS is a library that while available separately was also adopted by Adobe as a replacement for Wallaby in CS6 Unlike Wallaby which was a standalone program the Toolkit for CreateJS only works as a plug in inside Flash Professional it generates output for the HTML5 canvas animated with JavaScript 145 146 Around December 2013 the toolkit was integrated directly into Flash Professional CC 147 148 The following tools run Flash content in an HTML5 enabled browser but do not convert to a HTML5 webpage Shumway developed by Mozilla was an open source Flash virtual machine written in JavaScript Web Flash Player developed by GraphOGL Risorse is a free and on line Flash Player Flash virtual machine written in JavaScript 149 Criticisms EditMobile support Edit Websites built with Adobe Flash will not function on most modern mobile devices running Google Android or iOS iPhone iPad The only alternative is using HTML5 and responsive web design to build websites that support both desktop and mobile devices However Flash is still used to build mobile games using Adobe AIR Such games will not work in mobile web browsers but must be installed via the appropriate app store Vendor lock in Edit See also Vendor lock in The reliance on Adobe for decoding Flash makes its use on the World Wide Web a concern the completeness of its public specifications are debated and no complete implementation of Flash is publicly available in source code form with a license that permits reuse Generally public specifications are what makes a format re implementable see future proofing data storage and reusable codebases can be ported to new platforms without the endorsement of the format creator Adobe s restrictions on the use of the SWF FLV specifications were lifted in February 2009 see Adobe s Open Screen Project However despite efforts of projects like Gnash Swfdec and Lightspark a complete free Flash player is yet to be seen as of September 2011 For example Gnash cannot use SWF v10 yet 150 Notably Gnash was listed on the Free Software Foundation s high priority list from at least 2007 to its removal in January 2017 151 Notable advocates of free software open standards and the World Wide Web have warned against the use of Flash The founder of Mozilla Europe Tristan Nitot stated in 2008 152 Companies building websites should beware of proprietary rich media technologies like Adobe s Flash and Microsoft s Silverlight You re producing content for your users and there s someone in the middle deciding whether users should see your content Representing open standards inventor of CSS and co author of HTML5 Hakon Wium Lie explained in a Google tech talk of 2007 entitled the lt video gt element the proposal of Theora as the format for HTML5 video 153 I believe very strongly that we need to agree on some kind of baseline video format if the video element is going to succeed Flash is today the baseline format on the web The problem with Flash is that it s not an open standard Representing the free software movement Richard Stallman stated in a speech in 2004 that 154 The use of Flash in websites is a major problem for our community Accessibility and usability Edit Usability consultant Jakob Nielsen published an Alertbox in 2000 entitled Flash 99 Bad stating that Flash tends to degrade websites for three reasons it encourages design abuse it breaks with the Web s fundamental interaction principles and it distracts attention from the site s core value 155 Some problems have been at least partially fixed since Nielsen s complaints text size can be controlled using full page zoom and it has been possible for authors to include alternative text in Flash since Flash Player 6 Flash blocking in web browsers Edit Some websites rely heavily on Flash and become unusable without Flash Player or with Flash blocked Flash content is usually embedded using the object or embed HTML element 156 A web browser that does not fully implement one of these elements displays the replacement text if supplied by the web page Often a plugin is required for the browser to fully implement these elements though some users cannot or will not install it Since Flash can be used to produce content such as advertisements that some users find obnoxious or take a large amount of bandwidth to download some web browsers by default do not play Flash content until the user clicks on it e g Konqueror K Meleon Most current browsers have a feature to block plugins playing one only when the user clicks it Opera versions since 10 5 feature native Flash blocking Opera Turbo requires the user to click to play Flash content and the browser also allows the user to enable this option permanently Both Chrome 157 and Firefox 158 have an option to enable click to play plugins Equivalent Flash blocker extensions are also available for many popular browsers Firefox has Flashblock and NoScript Internet Explorer has Foxie which contains a number of features one of them named Flashblock WebKit based browsers under macOS such as Apple s Safari have ClickToFlash 159 In June 2015 Google announced that Chrome will pause advertisements and non central Flash content by default 160 Firefox from version 46 rewrites old Flash only YouTube embed code into YouTube s modern embedded player that is capable of using either HTML5 or Flash 161 Such embed code is used by non YouTube sites to embed YouTube s videos and can still be encountered for example on old blogs and forums However there are ways to pass this error in absence of flash player by deleting the validation code in HTML This also depends on browser vision Security Edit See also Adobe Flash Player Security and Browser security Plugins and extensions For many years Adobe Flash Player s security record 162 has led many security experts to recommend against installing the player or to block Flash content 163 164 The US CERT has recommended blocking Flash 165 and security researcher Charlie Miller recommended not to install Flash 166 however for people still using Flash Intego recommended that users get trusted updates only directly from the vendor that publishes them 167 Adobe Flash Player has over 1078 CVE entries 168 of which over 842 lead to arbitrary code execution and past vulnerabilities have enabled spying via web cameras 169 170 171 172 Security experts have long predicted the demise of Flash saying that with the rise of HTML5 the need for browser plugins such as Flash is diminishing 173 Active moves by third parties to limit the risk began with Steve Jobs in 2010 saying that Apple would not allow Flash on the iPhone iPod Touch and iPad citing abysmal security as one reason 174 Flash often used the ability to dynamically change parts of the runtime on languages on OSX to improve their own performance but caused general instability In July 2015 a series of newly discovered vulnerabilities resulted in Facebook s chief security officer Alex Stamos issuing a call to Adobe to discontinue the software entirely 175 and the Mozilla Firefox web browser Google Chrome and Apple Safari to blacklist all earlier versions of Flash Player 176 177 178 Flash cookies Edit Main article Local shared object Like the HTTP cookie a flash cookie also known as a Local Shared Object can be used to save application data Flash cookies are not shared across domains An August 2009 study by the Ashkan Soltani and a team of researchers at UC Berkeley found that 50 of websites using Flash were also employing flash cookies yet privacy policies rarely disclosed them and user controls for privacy preferences were lacking 179 Most browsers cache and history suppress or delete functions did not affect Flash Player s writing Local Shared Objects to its own cache in version 10 2 and earlier at which point the user community was much less aware of the existence and function of Flash cookies than HTTP cookies 180 Thus users with those versions having deleted HTTP cookies and purged browser history files and caches may believe that they have purged all tracking data from their computers when in fact Flash browsing history remains Adobe s own Flash Website Storage Settings panel a submenu of Adobe s Flash Settings Manager web application and other editors and toolkits can manage settings for and delete Flash Local Shared Objects 181 See also EditAdobe Creative Cloud List of 2D animation software OpenFLExplanatory footnotes Edit FLV and F4V Archived September 23 2010 at the Wayback Machine F4V is based on the ISO base media file format standard available as a free download at http standards iso org ittf PubliclyAvailableStandards index html References Edit a b Adobe Flash Player EOL Enterprise Information Page Adobe com Adobe Systems Retrieved November 21 2021 a b The switch from Flash to HTML5 now made easy with HARMAN Enterprise support for Adobe Flash harman com Harman International Retrieved November 21 2021 ADOBE AIR SDK harman com Harman International Retrieved November 21 2021 a b ADOBE FLASH PLAYER ENTERPRISE SUPPORT harman com Harman International Retrieved November 21 2021 a b c Adobe Flash Player 2021 Notice China Variant flash cn in Simplified Chinese Zhongcheng Network Technology Co Ltd Retrieved January 17 2021 a b c Flash amp The Future of Interactive Content Adobe Inc July 25 2017 Archived from the original on December 2 2017 Retrieved July 1 2019 AIR Roadmap Update Chris Campbell Adobe Blog July 25 2017 9 08 AM a b c d WARREN CHRISTINA November 20 2012 The Life Death and Rebirth of Adobe Flash Mashable Retrieved June 11 2015 a b Pinho Carlos July 7 2009 50 Beautiful Flash Websites Smashing Magazine Retrieved June 11 2015 Looking back at the best Flash sites of 2009 Archived October 18 2015 at the Wayback Machine Adobe Developer Connection 14 December 2009 DAVLIN ANN June 15 2011 35 Of The Best 3D Flash Websites Ever Smashing 3D Retrieved June 11 2015 20 Best 3D Websites Web Designer Drops September 15 2012 Google to automatically convert Flash web ads to HTML5 IT Pro Magazine Caroline Preece 27 Feb 2015 Google is killing its Swiffy tool for converting Flash files into HTML5 on July 1 venturebeat com June 15 2016 YOUTUBE NOW PLAYS HTML5 VIDEO BY DEFAULT ESCHEWS ADOBE FLASH Popular Science Dan Moren January 28 2015 YouTube ditches Adobe Flash for HTML5 on most browsers The Inquirer Chris Merriman Jan 28 2015 So long Flash YouTube now defaults to HTML5 on the web PC World Magazine Ian Paul Jan 28 2015 YouTube Flash app for TVs no longer available YouTube Help support google com Retrieved February 4 2021 a b c d e McCune Doug February 23 2009 Adobe Flex 3 0 For Dummies John Wiley amp Sons p Chapter 1 From HTML to RIA ISBN 978 0470436820 Rocchi Cesare 2011 Data Visualization with Flash Builder Focal Press ISBN 978 0240815039 a b Fain Yakov March 16 2010 Enterprise Development with Flex Best Practices for RIA Developers O Reilly Media Inc ISBN 978 1449388737 Speedtest net by Ookla The Global Broadband Speed Test What are the requirements to use Speedtest net Archived October 25 2016 at the Wayback Machine Speedtest net The world s most popular internet speed test finally drops Adobe Flash The Next Web Owen Williams 7 December 2015 Reeves Ben How Flash Games Changed Video Game History Game Informer Retrieved February 3 2022 Musil Steven It s game over for FarmVille as Flash also buys the farm CNET Retrieved February 3 2022 Alien Hominid PS2 ET palaa kotiin www pelit fi Retrieved February 3 2022 Adobe AIR TechSpot Retrieved May 5 2021 Do I need Adobe AIR or should I remove it Explained Windows Report Error free Tech Life July 24 2020 Retrieved May 5 2021 Adobe Flash Platform Submitting your iPhone application to the App Store help adobe com Retrieved May 5 2021 a b c d Grandmasters of Flash An Interview with the Creators of Flash Cold Hard Flash a b c d e f g h MACROMEDIA FLASH BACK Digital Archaeology PC Graphics amp Video Volume 6 Issues 1 6 Advanstar Communications 1997 Personal Computer Magazine PC Communications Corporation 1995 Waldron Rick August 27 2006 The Flash History Flashmagazine Archived from the original on August 20 2008 Retrieved June 18 2001 Gay Jonathan 2001 The History of Flash Adobe Systems Inc Archived from the original on February 4 2009 Retrieved October 18 2009 The History of Flash Back to Graphics Archived January 1 2015 at the Wayback Machine The History of Flash The Dawn of Web Animation Archived January 25 2008 at the Wayback Machine Grandmasters of Flash An Interview with the Creators of Flash ColdHardFlash com Retrieved February 12 2008 Coale Kristi Macromedia Rides the FutureWave Wired Retrieved March 29 2022 Flash Player in 2005 ZDNet Archived from the original on May 16 2007 Retrieved December 26 2008 Flynn Laurie J April 19 2005 Adobe Buys Macromedia for 3 4 Billion Published 2005 The New York Times ISSN 0362 4331 Retrieved March 4 2021 Joseph Labrecque 2011 What s New in Flash Player 11 O Reilly Media Inc p 17 ISBN 978 1 4493 1110 0 Adobe Flash Roadmap Adobe 1 Archived July 7 2015 at the Wayback Machine Introducing Flash Player 11 4 AIR 3 4 beta by Thibault Imbert Adobe employee ByteArray 1 Billion AIR Installations Ben Forta May 9 2014 Retrieved March 4 2021 Compass Intelligence Announces Winners of the 2014 Mobility Awards Compass Intelligence Compass Intelligence Announces Winners of the 2015 Mobility Awards Compass Intelligence Barrett Brian Sadly Adobe Flash Isn t Dead It Just Changed Its Name WIRED Retrieved June 22 2017 SWF Technology Center Adobe Developer Connection Archived August 22 2014 at the Wayback Machine Adobe com July 14 2009 Retrieved on March 11 2011 Adobe Open Screen Project ZDNet Archived from the original on August 11 2011 Retrieved March 21 2012 Starting today there will be no restrictions on the use of the SWF specification or the FLV and F4V specifications that make up video in Flash Formerly to look at the SWF specification users had to sign a licensing agreement not to use it to create competing players Adobe and Mozilla Foundation to Open Source Flash Player Scripting Engine Mozilla Foundation Press Center San Francisco November 7 2006 Archived from the original on October 21 2010 Retrieved September 3 2010 Tamarin Project Archived February 10 2007 at the Wayback Machine Mozilla org October 5 2010 Retrieved on March 11 2011 Adobe donates Flex to Apache Techworld Archived from the original on November 18 2011 Retrieved November 17 2011 a b Tim Anderson November 15 2015 Adobe Flex SDK bombshell STUNS developers The Register Archived from 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2009 Open Screen Project partners Archived from the original on February 24 2009 Retrieved February 20 2009 Adobe and Nokia Announce 10 Million Open Screen Project Fund February 16 2009 Archived from the original on February 19 2009 Retrieved February 20 2009 a b Fox Chris December 31 2020 Adobe Flash Player is finally laid to rest BBC News Retrieved December 31 2020 Smith Ernie October 9 2019 Flash Is Responsible for the Internet s Most Creative Era Vice Retrieved November 24 2020 a b c Lawhead Nathalie November 24 2020 The forgotten Flash Website movement when websites were the new emerging artform Gamasutra Retrieved November 24 2020 Valentino Devries Jennifer April 29 2010 Highlights The Journal s Exclusive Interview With Adobe CEO The Wall Street Journal Retrieved June 19 2017 Arthur Charles April 29 2010 Adobe CEO hits back in row with Steve Jobs over Flash on Apple s iPhone The Guardian Retrieved June 19 2017 a b Gross Doug November 9 2011 Did Steve Jobs kill Adobe Flash CNN 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Flash game disappears forever in 2020 but this project has preserved 38 000 of them PCGamesN Retrieved February 1 2020 Morton Lauren January 31 2020 Flashpoint launcher is saving Flash games from impending extinction Rock Paper Shotgun Retrieved February 1 2020 Matt Fisher 2013 HTML5 for Flash Developers Packt Publishing Ltd Stage3D versus WebGL p 91 ISBN 978 1 84969 333 2 a b Stage3D vs WebGL Performance Airtight Interactive Airtightinteractive com October 28 2011 Retrieved August 4 2014 Tools Spotlight CopperCube 4 0 MCV DEVELOP May 28 2014 Retrieved September 22 2014 Keith Gladstien 2013 Flash Game Development In a Social Mobile and 3D World Cengage Learning pp 383 421 ISBN 978 1 4354 6021 8 Thibault Imbert 2012 Introducing Starling O Reilly Media Inc ISBN 978 1 4493 2089 8 Wagner James Au 2012 Game Design Secrets John Wiley amp Sons p 130 ISBN 978 1 118 46391 8 Adobe Flash 11 adopts Unreal Engine 3 for better browser games The Verge theverge com October 7 2011 Retrieved August 4 2014 Melanson Mike January 27 2010 Solving Different Problems Penguin SWF Retrieved November 15 2014 Flash benchmarks on different operating systems October 17 2008 Paul Ryan October 16 2009 Hands on Hulu Desktop for Linux beta a big resource hog Ars Technica Retrieved December 4 2010 Flash Player 10 1 Performance improvements for Mac OS X May 6 2010 Flash Player 11 More stable and faster for Linux What just happened to video on the web Adobe Archived from the original on January 6 2010 Adobe Press release on MPEG 4 in Flash Player 9 Adobe com Archived from the original on December 3 2010 Retrieved December 4 2010 Adobe File Format Specification FAQ Adobe Systems Archived from the original on November 11 2007 Retrieved November 15 2007 Free Flash community reacts to Adobe Open Screen Project Archived from the original on September 28 2008 Retrieved November 29 2008 Kris Graft Scaleform GFx 4 Supports Flash 10 AS3 Gamasutra Retrieved October 1 2010 Using SWF Assets www openfl org 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27 2010 How to Tell if Adobe Flash Player Update is Valid Intego March 8 2013 Retrieved April 9 2013 Adobe Flash Player CVE security vulnerabilities versions and detailed reports Retrieved February 12 2015 291 total vulnerabilities Adobe remedies webcam spy hole in Flash Retrieved April 4 2012 Flash Player as a spy system Retrieved April 4 2012 Adobe Flash Player Settings Manager Adobe Systems Archived from the original on June 20 2010 Retrieved July 1 2010 Global Privacy Settings panel Adobe Systems Retrieved April 4 2012 Sophos Security Threat Report 2013 PDF Sophos December 2012 pp 11 24 Archived from the original PDF on February 3 2013 Retrieved May 9 2010 Jobs Steve April 29 2010 Thoughts on Flash Apple com Retrieved June 18 2012 Vincent James July 13 2015 Facebook s new chief security officer wants to set a date to kill Flash The Verge Retrieved July 14 2015 Firefox blacklists Flash player due to unpatched 0 day vulnerabilities Ars Technica Conde Nast July 14 2015 Retrieved July 15 2015 Adobe Flash has been blocked because it s out of date Google Support Retrieved October 20 2015 Apple blocks old unsafe Adobe Flash plug in versions in OS X Safari Apple Insider Retrieved October 24 2015 Hoofnagle Chris Jay Thomas Lauren Mayo Quentin Canty Shannon Soltani Ashkan August 10 2009 Soltani Ashkan Canty Shannon Mayo Quentin Thomas Lauren and Hoofnagle Chris Jay Flash Cookies and Privacy SSRN 1446862 a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a Cite journal requires journal help Local Shared Objects Flash Cookies Electronic Privacy Information Center July 21 2005 Archived from the original on April 16 2010 Retrieved March 8 2010 How to manage and disable Local Shared Objects Adobe Systems Inc September 9 2005 Retrieved March 8 2010 External links EditOfficial website Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Adobe Flash amp oldid 1146628961, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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