Adobe finally kills off the Flash brand

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.

https://digiday.com/?p=149308

More in Marketing

Marketing Briefing: What recent earnings for P&G, Unilever and Coke say about where the industry is headed

We read the corporate tea leaves to decipher some of the marketing trends and potential headwinds that executives at Unilever, Procter & Gamble and The Coca-Cola Company detailed during their earnings calls.

Roblox programmatic advertising

Why Roblox’s Clip It is using its billion-view moment to launch an ad product

The user experience of “Clip It” is similar to that of platforms such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts, allowing Roblox users to view, create and share short-form videos of their in-game avatars. Since launching in March 2024, it has rapidly become one of the most popular experiences on Roblox.

Inside the strategy that grew Cristiano Ronaldo’s YouTube account to 1M subscribers in 90 minutes

Ronaldo has created the largest sports-themed YouTube channel on the web in two months – but he’s not done it alone.