Adobe Flash Player 15.0.0.239

I was playing Dominant Species the other day when I was shocked to realize that my insects were likely to become extinct. Due to climate developments, the type of habitat they were most adapted to was disappearing fast. Needless to say, most of the insects did disappear, but a handful of them survived and made it to the final scoring. I lost of course, but it made me realize that becoming dominant is not required in order to survive. Unfortunately for you, this is the best analogy I could come up with when I started tackling this subject. It is also not a sales pitch.

Adobe Flash is a software and media platform that has been on your computer since 1996. It has been responsible for displaying online videos, playing online audio and running outlandish animations on web pages. Of course, most of the youth has played at least one browser based game. Flash is responsible for these also. What about this supposed extinction then? There are a couple of sings that indicate a will to move away from Flash and towards HTML 5 (the newest implementation of web coding), which is now also capable of delivering video and create animated websites. The late Steve Jobs advocated in 2010 that Flash is becoming obsolete. In 2011 Adobe Systems terminated the support for Flash on mobile platforms, basically making flash content unavailable on tablets and mobile phones. Now, four years after Steve's prediction there is a swirling debate of whether HTML 5 can completely replace Flash or not. There are articles popping up from time to time that declare Flash as being "dead", but just because you no longer can search your cache folder for a .flv file after viewing a YouTube video doesn't mean it's the end of the world.

Although the almighty Tube has renounced using Flash for its videos, you can still find it being used elsewhere for ads, embedded audio players and of course Flash based games. You still need Flash installed if you want to experience the full Internet. Developers know this. For example Google Chrome includes Flash Player and updates it automatically. Therefore, for a user, using Flash or not is a non-question. You most likely already have it.

Adobe Flash is an interesting subject. It seems that there are two camps arguing whether it is obsolete or not. But the truth is... who cares?! Let developers use it as long as they feel it's useful and then let technology run its course. The truth is, Flash is so wildly used for making animation that it will probably stick around for another decade or so.