Have you made your peace with Flash? - You never realize the great things in front of you until the end.

[CrippleThreat]

An older thread gave the news, but as clock rapidly moves towards the dawn of the new year, Flash will soon cease to be... Here's a reminder:

Saying goodbye to Flash in Chrome:

Today, Adobe announced its plans to stop supporting Flash at the end of 2020.

For 20 years, Flash has helped shape the way that you play games, watch videos and run applications on the web. But over the last few years, Flash has become less common. Three years ago, 80 percent of desktop Chrome users visited a site with Flash each day. Today usage is only 17 percent and continues to decline.

This trend reveals that sites are migrating to open web technologies, which are faster and more power-efficient than Flash. They’re also more secure, so you can be safer while shopping, banking, or reading sensitive documents. They also work on both mobile and desktop, so you can visit your favorite site anywhere.

These open web technologies became the default experience for Chrome late last year when sites started needing to ask your permission to run Flash. Chrome will continue phasing out Flash over the next few years, first by asking for your permission to run Flash in more situations, and eventually disabling it by default. We will remove Flash completely from Chrome toward the end of 2020.

If you regularly visit a site that uses Flash today, you may be wondering how this affects you. If the site migrates to open web standards, you shouldn’t notice much difference except that you'll no longer see prompts to run Flash on that site. If the site continues to use Flash, and you give the site permission to run Flash, it will work through the end of 2020.

It’s taken a lot of close work with Adobe, other browsers, and major publishers to make sure the web is ready to be Flash-free. We’re supportive of Adobe’s announcement today, and we look forward to working with everyone to make the web even better.

I've been frequenting the classic Andkon Arcade, which hosts a variety of games running via Flash. The games I've been rushing through currently are the Papa's Gameria series (tl;dr: endless food making sim as you rise through the ranks, and they all play the same). Papa's Pancakeria is my favorite out of the bunch I've touched thus far, and hopefully I'll be ably to get through them all not before long.

In addition to the inquiring title of the thread, I have another inquiry (separate from the poll): Do you have one Flash game in particular that is your favorite or that you enjoy?

Also, I've heard about Flashpoint and other means to keep playing Flash games past the set date. Redpill me on that.

 

[Rupert Bear]

HTML5 and Mobile internet were a mistake.

Edit: Also, along with Flashpoint, there's also a Flash web emulator on the works called "Ruffle". I heard it still has some compatibility problems but it looks promising.

 

[Syaoran Li]

I wonder if Newgrounds made good on their promise to back up as many of their old flash games as they could before the new year.

 

[StreetGangsta]

Nope.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

Fuck flash.

 

[The Shadow]

Fuck Tom King.

Wait, wrong Flash.

 

[agility_]

Good riddance.

 

[From The Uncanny Valley]

A lot of web cartoons are probably gone forever..

 

[Bee Head]

There's a flash emulator, I think. As long as you go to your favorite sites and save whatever .swfs you want, should be okay. Plus there's an effort already made to back up games, so I'm not worried. It was plagued with security vulnerabilities still being fixed in October 2020, so it's a good thing it's being retired.

Retarded of Adobe to not release the source code, even if that's their expected response.

 

[Bec]

I wonder if Newgrounds made good on their promise to back up as many of their old flash games as they could before the new year.

A lot of web cartoons are probably gone forever..

Everything on newgrounds is backed up now, I think people exaggerate the amount of loss.

 

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

I miss the early 2000s.
I remember when I learned how to install flash on my first smartphone and was super excited to watch my Homestarrunner cartoons on the go.
I guess everything dies eventually.
F

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

Flash had a plug-&-play versatility to it, you could just download a .swf straight from your browser and rehost it anywhere you wanted, but the same 2 megabyte file could easily be 200 megs once converted to video, and the former used vectors instead of pixels, guaranteeing a lossless file. The more paranoid side of me has the suspicion that the real reason for decommissioning it is that lamestream media has shifted its gaze of Sauron on the format as an alt-media competitor and wants it dead, no hobbyist underground counter-culture media alternative for you, but the simpler answer is that Adobe doesn't see a profit in patching any of the problems in the software they bought.

 

[Pissmaster]

Flash had a plug-&-play versatility to it, you could just download a .swf straight from your browser and rehost it anywhere you wanted, but the same 2 megabyte file could easily be 200 megs once converted to video, and the former used vectors instead of pixels, guaranteeing a lossless file. The more paranoid side of me has the suspicion that the real reason for decommissioning it is that lamestream media has shifted its gaze of Sauron on the format as an alt-media competitor and wants it dead, no hobbyist underground counter-culture media alternative for you, but the simpler answer is that Adobe doesn't see a profit in patching any of the problems in the software they bought.

I've always kinda suspected that too. The push against flash Apple made way back when the iPhone launched was weird, and I remember like half of the internet at the time incorporated Flash, making the iPhone a considerably crippled web browser.

HTML5 ostensibly has the ability to do a lot of what Flash did, but we just never see that. There just aren't websites like Homestar Runner anymore, every single web show is hosted on YouTube now, or struggling to be hosted by whatever video services will allow them, like the problem Murdoc Murdoc's had. It's pretty crappy how there's just no accessible vector-based animation system for the web anymore on the same scale.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

HTML5 ostensibly has the ability to do a lot of what Flash did, but we just never see that.

I recall someone saying that Javascript can't use classes or something that made it crippled when compared with other languages and that's the likely reason why we don't see more HTML5 games, not to mention how fucked up and difficult Javascript is. I've only ever seen like three HTML5 games.

 

[sasazuka]

Edit: Also, along with Flashpoint, there's also a Flash web emulator on the works called "Ruffle". I heard it still has some compatibility problems but it looks promising.

Ruffle works pretty well with no major issues (as far as I've noticed yet) on my 2012 Macbook Pro but not very well at all on my underpowered 2013 HP 2000 Notebook PC running Windows 7. I think it's just a RAM thing.

 

[Mr. Bung]

I miss the early 2000s.
I remember when I learned how to install flash on my first smartphone and was super excited to watch my Homestarrunner cartoons on the go.
I guess everything dies eventually.
F

Ah yes, the time when edgelords and euphoric fedora tippers were everywhere, before they were widely given the sperg treatment. Their shit was all over Newgrounds and Youtube. Some of it was funny but in hindsight most was really cringy. They've gotta be one of the few things about the early internet I don't miss.

EDIT: Lol just to be clear I mean that I don't miss early forms of internet spergery. I've always loved flash games and movies.

 

[Meat Pickle]

Flash games were literally my childhood and I remember making friends over them. Hopefully those flash emulators will let me relive my childhood forever.

 

[Frank D'arbo]

As a few people said, Ruffle exists, and The Brothers Chaps are using it to archive Homestar Runner so it won't be lost to time

 

[Pissmaster]

Ah yes, the time when edgelords and euphoric fedora tippers were everywhere, before they were widely given the sperg treatment. Their shit was all over Newgrounds and Youtube. Some of it was funny but in hindsight most was really cringy. They've gotta be one of the few things about the early internet I don't miss

They’re still around, they just all trooned out and/or contracted Trump Derangement Syndrome

 

[Next Task]

It would be nice to not lose progress in any number of Flash games I've played on Kongregate, but that site as a whole doesn't seem up to the task of preserving those games anyway. There's still some great games that were made in Flash - surprisingly deep levels of gameplay or just really fun diversions.

I'll use a new browser if necessary, but I've certainly had difficulty trying to preserve progress, let alone any games themselves.