Imlisanen Jamir
As we enter December, we also enter the last month of an old internet staple which has been standing on its last legs for years now. Adobe’s Flash software will end on December 31. This veteran concept of rich internet content is facing its retirement on New Years’ Eve, and come January 1, 2021, there will be no more support for it.
For 20 years, Flash has helped shape the way that we play games, watch videos and run applications on the web. But over the last few years, Flash has become less common. Three years ago, 80 percent of desktop Chrome users visited a site with Flash each day. Today usage is only 17 percent and continues to decline.
This trend reveals that sites are migrating to open web technologies, which are faster and more power-efficient than Flash. They’re also more secure, so we can be safer while shopping, banking, or reading sensitive documents. They also work on both mobile and desktop, so we can visit our favourite site anywhere.
While the old gives way to emerging technologies, the end of Flash is also sad. Untold numbers of free games on the internet, the games we played on our web browsers in stolen minutes from work, studying, and other tasks we’re supposed to be doing, will eventually be unplayable.
Like the disappearance or increasing irrelevance of many other digital pillars of the 1990s and early 2000s, the end of the Flash plug-in spells the end of a particular era, a more freewheeling one. This was a time in which we could build terrible websites, write worse fan fiction, and, for the more programming-savvy among us, build games with often endearingly crude graphics on the Flash plug-in, software that is—or was—universal.
For those in the 90s and the 2000s, powerful computer hardware was a distant dream, especially if you lived in the tech backwaters of the world—as we did. Playing games was an escape but running the latest ones was not possible. Enter Flash. All Flash needed was a browser, some form of internet (those dial up modems were enough), and you were all set to spend frustrating hours struggling to weave through sluggish mechanics playing tons of unoriginal games.
But we enjoyed them and they were the escape we so desperately craved.
True, many of these games probably don’t need to be saved. Their gameplay mechanics may be glitchy and unintuitive, or perhaps they’re blatant rip-offs of more popular games. Still, there was something beautiful about this early internet, where these things simply could exist because the developers thought, Why not?
It was all so ugly, slow and unwieldly. But there was an element of purity to it—an authenticity which is sadly lacking in this constantly airbrushed digital world we live in now.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
