For roughly a decade, Adobe Flash was how the web did rich media. Games, video players, animations, and entire interactive sites ran inside the Flash Player browser plugin, which delivered capabilities that plain HTML of the era could not. At its peak Flash was installed on nearly every desktop browser.
The turn came in 2010, when Apple refused to allow Flash on the iPhone and iPad. Steve Jobs laid out the reasoning in an open letter, “Thoughts on Flash,” published in April 2010, arguing that Flash was proprietary, drained battery life, was a frequent source of crashes and security problems, and was not designed for touch devices. With the mobile web growing fast and Apple’s devices locked to it, Flash’s universality was broken.
At the same time, the open web was catching up. HTML5 brought native video, audio, animation, and richer graphics directly into browsers, removing the main reasons sites had reached for Flash in the first place. Content steadily migrated off the plugin.
Adobe announced in July 2017 that it would end Flash, and the official end of life arrived on schedule. Adobe’s own end-of-life notice states that the company stopped supporting Flash Player after December 31, 2020, and “blocked Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021,” urging users to “immediately uninstall Flash Player” to protect their systems. A technology that once defined the interactive web was deliberately switched off.