The slow death of Flash


Quartz:

The Flash Player plugin, a proprietary piece of software required to load Flash content in a web browser, was originally a big part of what made the technology so revolutionary. It guaranteed the content would look and behave the same way for anyone who loaded it, regardless of what type of browser or computer they were using. But once technologies capable of running natively in web browsers gained steam, that same plugin requirement became a liability.

Adobe's Flash and Shockwave were truly great in the late '90s to mid '00s. While there were standards, there were also numerous flavors of browsers and platforms with their own custom presentation media. A cross-platform, browser agnostic plug-in that assured a universal multimedia presentation was awesome. Adobe also had some nice developer tools to make it all work.

The rapid emergence of mobile web devices, however, upset the platform. Apple famously refused to adopt Flash due to high overhead and poor user experience on touch devices. Improved capabilities and standardization with HTML 5, CSS 3, and Javascript made plug-ins less necessary tools. Finally security became an increasing concern with web-based malware.

Anyway, this is nice recap of the last 10-15 years where Flash is taking is final laps around the drain.