Adobe Flash player

Jay Dee

Hi,

.


Adobe Flash player has stopped working.
I used to play games on line ( Free ) but now
I cannot access the games as it looks for Adobe Flash player
and will not let me in...

Is there a way of paying without Adobe Flash player.
I'm using Chrome.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

Jay

Retr0gamer

Pretty sure Archive.org is trying to preserve as many as possible.

Jay Dee

Hi,

Sorry about the spelling mistake.....

Should have read....
...............................................................
Hi,

.Adobe Flash player has stopped working.
I used to play games on line ( Free ) but now
I cannot access the games as it looks for Adobe Flash player
and will not let me in...

Is there a way of playing without Adobe Flash player.
I'm using Chrome.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

Jay


...............................................................................

and not paying !!

Thanks..

Tork

Have you tried any other browsers?

Jay Dee

Hi,

Thanks for the advice.
But I would prefer not to have to change to another browser.

I was hoping that the free on line sites would have made some alternative available to their players?

Thanks
Jay

o1s1n

Keep an eye on the updates on the Newgrounds website, if anyone is going to keep flash going for game content, it's them.

https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player

Retr0gamer

There's definitely solutions around it already but the Flash player now will actively not run anything.

Hopefully it can all be saved. Some absolute junk made on flash but some real iconic stuff like Happy Wheels and some genuinely amazing stuff as well like abobo's adventure and Tower of Heaven which I'd recommend to anyone as a fantastic and short little indie game with amazing music.

Doge

Samorost 1 + 2 were savage also, very unique art style.

Also that unofficial Portal flash game was great also.

eddhorse

As mentioned this website is keeping Flash games going
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash

More info here
https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/why-is-adobe-flash-player-being-discontinued-we-explain/

In spite of its popularity, Flash was plagued by security vulnerabilities that allowed hackers to exploit its weaknesses to hit their victims. Then websites shifted from using the Flash plug-in to HTML5. Flash’s goose was cooked when, in 2011, between the move to HTML5 and the increasing popularity of mobile devices, the company failed to read the writing on the wall, and announced that Adobe was no longer developing Flash for mobile devices.


Part of the reason most websites opted for HTML5 is that it can be used to play multimedia content within webpages without the need to install or update plugins for that purpose. These vulnerabilities might explain why Apple was its greatest critic, and why the late Steve Jobs never hid his feelings about the plugin’s shortcomings.

The modern browser’s preference for HTML5 seemed to add salt to injury, thus speeding up Flash’s exit. All of these issues probably weighed heavily on, and informed, Adobe’s decision to phase out the plugin.

Also, with browsers such as Google making Flash a click-to-play plugin that required users to explicitly enable it, and little that Flash could do that HTML5 could not, Flash became an unnecessary add-on extension.

While Google continued to use Flash, unlike Apple, it soon realized that it was pointless to continue holding on when Adobe stopped supporting the software towards the end of 2019. And that is how Adobe Flash Player was relegated to the back burner, leading to its upcoming demise.

The end had come and it was time for a plugin that had ruled the technology world for almost two decades to say goodbye.

Retr0gamer

Flash was always complete ****. Ran like an absolute dog as well. However it had a few things going for it. It was actually a fully fledged coding language that was very easy to learn. Applications could be made very small as animations could be made with transformations rather than rendering distinct frames. And then you could easily put whatever you make up on a website. Meant it exploded in the homebrew sector. HTML5 pretty much covers all of that but actually works properly so it was always dead once it arrived.

Did cost me a job though. Went for an interview with a games company that was lead by a load of animators and one programmer. They were making the game in flash and all the animations were made in flash. I was baffled when the animators were saying they were having a hard time keeping the file size down as they had to store thousands of frames of animation. So I asked why were they storing frames of animation, the game is made in flash, the animations are made in flash, they can be imported into the game as code. Well I had uncovered that their main coder was a total hack who then proceeded to try and sabotage me through the whole interview about how I had no flash coding experience.

Probably a lucky escape.

o1s1n

Hopefully your interview cost the programmer his job too!

Lemming

Retr0gamer wrote: »

HTML5 pretty much covers all of that but actually works properly so it was always dead once it arrived.

As Retr0gamer has alluded to, Flash is now deprecated as Adobe have wound it down and are no longer supporting it since it went End-Of-Life at the end of December 2020. Most up-to-date browsers (i.e. those that can handle HTML5) will encourage you to de-install it now as a gaping security risk since it is no longer supported.

Retr0gamer

o1s1n wrote: »

Hopefully your interview cost the programmer his job too!

Well red flags went up when I heard they were coding in flash. Even back then flash was dead and making a mobile game in flash for release on apple devices... You were setting yourself up for a nightmare. I could understand the animators, this was before illustrator had taken over and flash was the biggest animation tool at the time but then they didn't even use the advantage of importing their animations as code to flash to offset the fact they were using flags at all

Skerries

Flash asked to uninstall for me as I hadn't used it in months

megaten

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Well red flags went up when I heard they were coding in flash. Even back then flash was dead and making a mobile game in flash for release on apple devices... You were setting yourself up for a nightmare. I could understand the animators, this was before illustrator had taken over and flash was the biggest animation tool at the time but then they didn't even use the advantage of importing their animations as code to flash to offset the fact they were using flags at all

Don't think anyone uses illustrator for animation beyond setting up shapes for import into after effects even now.
In fairness back when flash was still a thing most way to export animations from it were done using custom tools. I don't think adobe provided any methods to do this.

Always though flash was fairly maligned. Some TV studio still use it for animation as far as I'm aware and the fact that nothing has come close to replacing it in terms of usability shows it had its placed. It was really just the shift to mobile devices that killed it. I don't think it particularly heavy on resources compared to anything else that abstract away development like a Wordpress page builder and plugins

Lemming

megaten wrote: »

Always though flash was fairly maligned. Some TV studio still use it for animation as far as I'm aware and the fact that nothing has come close to replacing it in terms of usability shows it had its placed. It was really just the shift to mobile devices that killed it. I don't think it particularly heavy on resources compared to anything else that abstract away development like a Wordpress page builder and plugins

Flash was horrendously abused and rightly maligned as a result. It wouldn't scale with device size, or a user's accessibility needs thus removing disabled people's ability to use a website, etc.

It wasn't the move to mobile devices that killed flash; at least not in their own right. With smaller, "finite computing devices" (read not a desktop with horsepower and massive screen) came the whole notion of "responsive design" and the need to scale to differing screen sizes and layouts, portrait vs. landscape context, etc. With responsive design also came a renewed focus on things user accessibility, and a need to not maintain code forks of the same application.

Retr0gamer

And all that stuff could be done with 'kiddy script' css. I imagine doing the same with flash would be a nightmare.

Even adobe totally dropped it from their web design. Can't remember what it was I was using as a platform to create websites when I was doing a stint in that but it was an adobe product that could do flash style websites (stuff like full motion video as background, animations and interactivity) all with CSS and HTML5.

megaten

All those accessibility problems still exist though. Flash was compatible with screen readers if anyone cared enough, which unfortunately they don't.

Lemming

megaten wrote: »

All those accessibility problems still exist though. Flash was compatible with screen readers if anyone cared enough, which unfortunately they don't.

Oh yes, you still need to do certain things to make any boring, plain old HTML site machine readable. The wholesale abuse of Flash made that particular set of problems infinitely worse, never mind for the rest of us. I lost track of the amount of sites that had to be viewed at certain resolutions or using certain browsers because sh1t kept breaking because people decided - probably after having snorted a line of powered domestos up their @rse - to build entire sites, navigation and all, on top of flash. This was also back when broadband wasn't so prevalent nor speeds fast enough to make any large downloads anything short of a chore so you also had to content with waiting a few minutes for a site to load because the developer did the work all on their machine and didn't stop to check what the real life experience might actually be.

Flash had its purpose; building websites was not it however and that is what it will be mostly remembered for by anyone who worked on websites in the first decade of the 21st century. That old maxim was never more true: "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".

Edit: anyway, I think I'm stepping off the general topic of playing old retro games via flash and into rant about flash territory so I'll quit whilst I'm still relatively ahead so with my apologies folks.