Flash memory technology (flash memory has finally come to the end of its life)
Adobe Flash, everyone who has been on the Internet should have heard of it. On the last day of 2020, we finally say goodbye to it.
Flash is a multimedia creation and playback support technology that once played an important role in the history of Internet technology. More than 20 years ago, when the hacking technology was not as advanced as it is today, people used to rely heavily on Flash to hack all kinds of cool and interactive online content such as web pages, advertisements, small software, and games.
Google evaluates Flash like this: In the past 20 years, Flash has shaped the way people play games, watch videos and run programs on the Internet. In recent years, however, Flash has become less popular (especially with Google’s efforts to promote HTML5 over Flash).
In 2014, about 80% of Chrome browser users visited websites containing Flash content. This figure will be only 17% in 2017; today, it can only be lower. For example, among the websites that Silicon Star people visit every day, only the backend of the WeChat official account and the Meitu Xiuxiu website still use Flash.
(How do I know if the website I am visiting contains Flash content? Take Chrome as an example. If you see the following icon on the right side of the address bar, it means that the webpage contains Flash content, which has been blocked by the browser by default Block.)
Why was Flash abandoned? The main reasons include security and inefficiency of computing resources.
To put it simply, Flash, as a technology that has been born for more than 20 years, objectively has many “loopholes” in order to ensure compatibility. In the era when Flash was still very popular, a large part of the vulnerabilities of general browser products was due to the need to support Flash.
Flash was very avant-garde when it was first born, but with the advancement of Internet technology in terms of time and other aspects, it is now quite backward. Open source technologies such as HTML5 and Web Assembly are also used to render interactive content, run faster, use less computing resources, and consume less power than Flash. Coupled with security issues, it can be said that Flash really has no advantage.
Flash is fundamentally a closed-source technology, independently maintained by its current owner, Adobe, but it doesn’t make any money for Adobe, so the company doesn’t care much about maintaining Flash, it also Licenses are sold to less reputable licensees in some countries. What happens when something goes wrong with flash memory and causes a vulnerability? Browser manufacturers still have to wait for Adobe to repair the Youyou resource network, which really can’t help…
This is why companies such as Apple and Google have been expressing their dissatisfaction with Flash for the past ten years.
Apple decided not to support Flash in iOS, co-founderJobs wrote to Adobe publicly in 2010, bombarding various problems with Flash. In 2015, YouTube turned to HTML5 in an all-round way, and Google also released technology to convert Flash ads to HTML5 on mobile devices. That year, even Adobe couldn’t resist the pressure to encourage Flash developers to move to HTML5.
In 2017, Adobe finally announced the end-of-life plan for Flash products. Some developers hoped that Adobe would make Flash an open source project to “preserve an important chapter in the history of the Internet,” but those efforts have failed. Maybe Adobe doesn’t want anything to do with Flash anymore.
Flash’s Past Life
In 1993, serial entrepreneur Charlie Jackson (Charlie Jackson) Joined former close associate Jonathan Gay’s new company FutureWave.
According to the technology media Ars Technica, Guy’s last company in Jackson, Silicon Beach Software, was already a core programmer, and he was still in middle school at the time, developing a batch of Well-known games and creative software.
The core product of FutureWave is called SmartSketch, which is a vector drawing program on PenPoint OS and the predecessor of Flash.
Pen OS didn’t do much better, and was shut down by AT&T, the later owner. At that time, other companies in the stylus field did not perform well, and Wacom Huage was one of them. The company was supposed to participate in SIGGFRAPH, the top computer graphics conference, but gave up due to cost considerations and gave up the booth to FutureWave; but at that conference, SmartSketch’s sales were also very bleak.
However, the development of FutureWave has not stopped. In the mid-1990s, with the advancement of computer hacking technology, the Internet became more and more popular. FutureWave adds functions such as frame-by-frame drawing on the basis of SmartSketch, and the latest content can be played on the web page. The product was renamed FutureSplash Animator and supports Macintosh and Windows systems. Of course, with the drawing tool, the generated content also needs to be played, so they wrote another player in Java, called future Flash Player-the predecessor of Flash Player.
Jackson revealed in a blog last year that in 1995, FutureWave found an appointment with the then CEO of Adobe through relationships.John Warnock, hope Adobe will buy both products. But unfortunately, the product they came out with was too rough, and the simple animation was stuck, so Warnock fell.
FutureWave can only release its own FutureSplash series of products. Although it failed to please Adobe’s boss, FutureWave’s transformation was very successful, and it also saved this small workshop company that was on the verge of bankruptcy. One, Microsoft saw FutureFlash and thought it was very good. Later, giant companies such as Disney and Fox began to use FutureFlash to develop web pages and content services.
With the help of Disney, Macromedia acquired FutureWave in 1996. The core product is renamed Flash. Creative software company Macromedia was then an Adobe competitor and predecessor to FutureWave in the web design space.
Flash 2.0 was released in 1997. Over the next few years, it gradually added important features such as audio synchronization, photo import, bitmap vectorization, playback control buttons, scripting, and data storage, and gradually became a fairly powerful (and relatively small) tool for developing web programs. )Tool of.
Flash Player also quickly gained users’ favor. It was reported at the time that by 2005, Flash Player had surpassed Java, QuickTime, Real, and WMP to become the most installed web content player in the world.
A large number of websites use Flash technology to drive web pages, online games, video and audio content. According to Ars Technica, around 2005, advertisers were willing to pay developers five or even six figures per game to be embedded in those well-known Flash games. The most famous Flash games have millions of daily visits. Many games that are still popular today, such as “Kingdom Run”, were originally Flash games, or were based on Flash ***.
Now, behind YouTube, which has become the world’s largest online video website, Flash has contributed a lot. The popularity of YouTube has made Flash Player an indispensable software.
In 2005, Adobe acquired Macromedia for US$3.4 billion through a stock exchange, and won the latter’s core products, including Flash and Dreamweaver, which also made this office/creative Software companies have become leaders in the Internet industry. Jackson revealed that then-Adobe CEO Bruce Chee told him that Flash alone was worth $3 billion in that acquisition…
In 2008, Adobe released Adobe Integrated Runtime, which is a runtime engine used to partially replace Flash Player (later Adobe AIR). It has many new and powerful features, such as enabling Flash developers to access the user’s file system, and once again extending the layout of Flash technology. By 2014, Adobe AIR reached the milestone of 1 billion installations and 100,000 independent applications developed worldwide, and then won the Best Mobile Application Development Product Award at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) for two consecutive years.
But at that time, mobile Internet technology was changing with each passing day, and there was already a trend in the industry to migrate to HTML5 and other open source solutions that were considered more advanced. Flash is indeed powerful, but its growth has declined due to security and performance flaws.
More than ten years ago, when the mobile Internet began to flourish with the emergence of iPhone and iOS, the end of Flash seemed to be doomed.
Jobs was very optimistic about Adobe, and Apple was one of Adobe’s earliest customers. In 1982, Jobs tried to buy Adobe for $5 million. Although it was rejected, with the help of shareholders, he paid a 5 times premium to obtain a 19% stake in the latter and a series of key technology licenses.
But when Apple developed the iPhone and iOS with intergenerational status, Jobs no longer appreciated Flash, one of Adobe’s core technologies at that time.
In 2010, because some Apple critics attacked Jobs’ decision to refuse to support Flash on iPhone, iPod and iPad, he published a public article on the official website to comment on the rise of Flash and HTML5, pointing out that Flash is 100% closed. source technology whose stability and security are too poor to be installed on Apple’s mobile devices.
As Epic Games, Basecamp, and other developers who have gone head-to-head with Apple over the past year have argued, Adobe also believes that Apple’s refusal to support Flash on mobile platforms is a deliberate attempt to prevent Flash-based games and Massive Flash content represented by video, thus protecting its sphere of influence.
Adobe also filed a lawsuit against Apple for this matter, and the issue rose to antitrust, which was introduced to the US Federal Trade Commission. Even Adobe ended up winning the case. However, Flash has become such an obsolete technology that the end of retirement may have been written when Apple decided not to support it on mobile platforms.
Advertisements posted on Adobe’s Youyou Resources website ten years ago, unfortunately, many users of Apple mobile devices cannot see them, because they are published in Flash…
In 2011, Adobe announced that it would no longer provide resources for Flash development on mobile platforms. 2In 2015, Adobe changed the name of Flash, changed the name of some creative products to Animate, and published an official blog encouraging content creators to adopt “new web standards”—also like HTML5—to develop content.
On July 25, 2017, Adobe finally officially announced the end-of-sale plan for Flash products: on December 31, 2020, the development support for Flash Player will be terminated; on January 12, 2021, Flash Player will no longer support playback of Flash content; meanwhile, the company “strongly recommends” all users to uninstall Flash Player from their systems immediately.
On the same day, Google announced that it would phase out support for Flash in the Chrome browser. This process was basically synchronized with Adobe and lasted for several years: at the beginning, when users browsed web pages with Flash content, they would be asked whether to run Flash support; then Flash was blocked by default, and users needed to go through a series of operations to open the whitelist for the website ;Finally, by the end of 2020, Flash content will be completely blocked.
Today is 2021. We can finally say goodbye to Flash who has been with us for more than 20 years.
How to completely uninstall Flash?
Adobe users are advised to uninstall Flash Player immediately. Compared with Adobe’s other CC series products, uninstalling Flash Player is not that complicated.
First of all, if you haven’t installed a standalone Flash player, you can only use it on a browser. Mainstream browsers include Chrome, Edge, Firefox, etc. Blocking of Flash content has already begun.
If you have manually turned on Flash for certain websites, you can turn it off in your browser’s settings menu. (Take Chrome as an example: Settings→Privacy and Security→Site Settings→Other Settings→Flash)
On Windows, if the user has installed the independent Flash Player, Adobe recommends that the user first close all possible Flash technology. browsers and games. Then, users can download the Flash Player uninstaller from Adobe’s official website, run it directly and follow the prompts.
Then the user needs to make sure to delete all related folders and files of Flash Player and restart the computer. Paths to these files may include: