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In with a bang, out in a Flash.
Adobe quietly announced last night that it’s killing off the Flash name, partially putting an end to the insecure and hack-prone software. Starting in January, Adobe is pushing developers to use Adobe Animate CC, an application based on the more secure and versatile HTML5.
“Adobe has a history of pioneering and advancing industry standards. We embrace standards and, where none exist, we create them,” the company wrote in Flash’s obituary. “Flash has played a leading role in bringing new capabilities to the web.”
Despite that the Flash name is disappearing, Adobe will still support the software as it is still used on games and some ads.
It could be said that Flash was dealt its fatal blow in 2010, when Apple founder Steve Jobs trashed Flash. “Flash is a spaghetti-ball piece of technology that has lousy performance and really bad security problems,” Jobs reportedly said.
A year later, Adobe scrapped plans to develop Flash for mobile devices, instead focusing its efforts on HTML5. From there, it only spiraled down for the company, with Amazon and Google announcing it will stop showing user’s Flash-based ads over the past few months.
Agencies, however, have struggled giving up on Flash to develop ads because of its familiarity and unwillingness to learn new applications. That poses problems, like in July when hackers infiltrated ads on Yahoo’s network of websites and infected people with malware that allowed them to remotely operate their computers.
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