Adobe has announced that they will end support for Flash in 2020.

Several industries and businesses have been built around Flash technology – including gaming, education and video – and we remain committed to supporting Flash through 2020, as customers and partners put their migration plans into place. Adobe will continue to support Flash on a number of major OSs and browsers that currently support Flash content through the planned EOL. This will include issuing regular security patches, maintaining OS and browser compatibility and adding features and capabilities as needed. We remain fully committed to working with partners, including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla to maintain the security and compatibility of Flash content. […] In addition, we plan to move more aggressively to EOL Flash in certain geographies where unlicensed and outdated versions of Flash Player are being distributed.

Like Jeffrey Veen in this tweet thread, I also have mixed feelings.

https://twitter.com/veen/status/890243932436779014

https://twitter.com/veen/status/890244039039209472

I started fiddling with the web in the mid-90s, so there is all the pioneering and craziness that happened around the Flash technology, the excitement of designers having a defined and controllable/predictable canvas, suddenly animation, typography and sound was possible, media players, video… all that newfangled stuff that was possible with "multimedia" and had previously only been in the domain of CD-rom stuff with Macromedia's Director -- just: wow.
But at the same time with every Flash-Intro or Flash-only website, the core strength of the web was crippled: content hidden away in a blackboxed browser plugin, unreachable and unindexable from the outside. In my experience few people cared for alternative content or provided a useful fallback. Who would not want to install the flash plugin? Bah, fallbacks (in a way the stance some 'web'developers heavily into JavaScript now have seems similar to that mindset) And here's the thing, had everybody back then worked in a progressive enhancement mindset, maybe many pioneering and surprising things wouldn't have happened because no energy/time/budget was left after laying the foundations? Who knows. But not only was the content tucked away, the compiled swf files offered no way of having a look at the source codes - which used to be one of the first things I did on websites whenever I came across something new and wanted to understand how it was done. And then adapt it, break it, reassamble it, tweak it, make something new.

Yup, mixed feelings here. I never truly followed the siren songs, but of course I dabbled with Flash (even build an Interactive Fender Jaguar to explain all the switches and combinations and resulting sounds which gained some attraction over the years), but to me the 'boring' web stack has always been of more interest. Which for my whole professional carreer puts me in between the continental drift of short lived hype (what all the clients, agencies and designers want to have, and want to have it now) and the sustainability, accessibility and discoverability which needs boring and often hidden (and thus difficult to sell) work and, if done right can do so much more for digital products than shiny interfaces alone. Sigh.

I will always associate Flash with the gazillions of nearly unreadable 10px pixel fonts sites, the tons of 'loading' intros, and that certain sci-fi interface look that was so hot for a while.
And in recent years? Security updates. Critical fixes over and over again.

So yeah, thanks for all the Flash, I'm sure that the web we have now would be quite different, if Flash didn't exist, and I'm not sure if it would be better.