Flash dies at dawn

Adobe finally killed off Flash at the start of the year. It will no longer update it, or fix any security issues, and has publicly asked people to uninstall it.

To make sure that people take notice, Adobe has also announced that the Flash player will no longer run any videos or animations from January 11.

You can find more details, and a short history of Flash (which first launched in 1996) here at the BBC website.

At one point, when this kind of thing seemed like a good idea, people tried to use it to replace html and css. I know because, for a short time, I did just that and ran the EarthG website as a complex set of Flash movies inside a full-screen container on an HTML web page.

While an interesting technical experiment in using object oriented actionscript, it had massive disadvantages. Not least, the fact that no search engine could find it.

The experiment lasted a short while and I never considered doing anything like that again. If nothing else it proved a powerful practical demonstration of the advisability of open standards.