The general consensus in the tech world is that the Adobe Flash was good while it lasted, and 99 percent of websites look forward to the next best thing in web development.
Voices from the industry pointed out that 2015 might be the last year when Adobe Flash makes headlines. Adobe lately changed the name of the Flash Professional developer tools to Animate, further suggesting that Adobe Flash was taking its final laps.
Five years ago, Steve Jobs wrote an essay explaining why he opposed having Adobe Flash Player on iPhones. In his essay, Jobs detailed why iPhones and iPads would never see Adobe Flash embedment, and experience showed that Jobs' writing applied to PCs, too.
One strong reason for banning Flash from iOS was the unjustified resource consumption. With mobile devices leaning towards becoming thinner and lighter, any battery draining piece of software is guaranteed to get black-listed.
Another, no less essential aspect, is that security problems plagued Adobe Flash all throughout its history. Exploits became the rule rather than the exception, to an extent that hackers took over the sandboxing that (allegedly) had to keep Google Chrome's vulnerability low.
The concerns regarding Flash optimization and safety mounted to the point where tech experts asked its developer to kill it altogether, on all platforms.
Facebook CSO Alex Stamos asked Adobe too for the plugin. Popular Internet movements, such as "Occupy Flash" appeared, urging users to axe Flash on their devices. "Occupy Flash" also appealed to developers to use HTML5 as an alternative to Flash, a thing most of them are already doing.
Thanks to the accelerated adoption of digital-rights management for HTML5, most websites that promote video and music content ditched Adobe Flash in favor of the new standard. Big names such as YouTube and Netflix do not require Flash anymore, as opposed to Rdio and Google Play Music. In an attempt to catch up with the latest tendency, Amazon unveiled an HTML 5 player in July.
Other companies took small steps towards fully committing to HTML 5. Autodesk, for example, slowly implemented a WebGL and HTML5- based version of its online photo editing tool, Pixlr.
The current version of Pixlr still works on Flash.
"If you look back two years ago [...] the technology wasn't as mature as today," said Thomas Heermann, director of digital arts for Autodesk's consumer business.
"There were limitations on HTML5, but now you don't see any problems anymore," Heermann added.
Earlier this month, Facebook officially announced that it departed from Flash and chose HTML5 for video content. The social media company noted that HTML5 offered "excellent testing infrastructure," and praised how useful tools such as Web and Jest are on an HTML5-only platform.
One extra benefit of using HTML5 is an increased level of accessibility to screen readers. This means that users who are visually impaired could gain better access to the social media platform. A stronger website security should come from the use of HTML5, underlining again that developers feared Flash due to its vulnerabilities.
"Not only did launching the HTML5 video player make development easier, but it also improved the video experience for people on Facebook," wrote Daniel Baulig, front-end developer at Facebook.
It should be noted that the bigger a site is, the harder it is to make an upgrade such as re-coding everything from Flash to HTML5.
However difficult it may be to keep up with today's web development, the trend is set. According to reports from web technology survey firm W3Techs, the use of Adobe Flash declined from 28.5 percent on all sites in 2010 to under 10 percent in 2015.
