Next month, one of the moments that many of us have been waiting for finally arrives: the end of Flash. This plug-in has been very important for the evolution of the Internet up to what we know today. However, we cannot deny that it has become obsolete, and that right now the only thing it contributes are performance problems and vulnerabilities to the webs. Its disappearance is something necessary, although, unfortunately, with it will die a great amount of original content that is part of the history of the Internet . We talk about all kinds of games and animations .
Programs all kinds of multimedia content in Flash was really simple. Thanks to this, the network was filled with all kinds of content, available for free through a multitude of web pages. Currently, many of these web pages have closed, and those that remain open have deleted a large part of the content they had to be able to migrate to new standards, such as HTML5.
Internet Archive is a non-profit platform that seeks to preserve everything classics, from books and games to, of course, this type of Flash content that once animated so many web pages.
The Definitive Internet History Collection
Thanks to Internet Archive we will be able to find a complete database with all kinds of Flash content , from animations to games, that we can reproduce without problems from our browser. For this, this platform has chosen to start using a Flash emulator, called Ruffle , which will allow us to reproduce this type of content in any web browser, even if it no longer has support for the Adobe plugin. The emulator is still in development and is not perfect, but it works perfectly for reloading a large amount of content.
We can access this entire content library from this link . At the moment it only has a little more than 800 elements between animations and games, but it is expected that over time, and with the help of users, the number of elements will grow until it covers most of the history of the Internet.
What will the Internet be without Flash
As of January 1, 2021 , Flash will no longer be Adobe’s problem, but rather that of users. The company is no longer going to launch a single more update, or a security update, leaving all users who still use this add-on exposed to the slightest vulnerability.
Microsoft has already started to remove all Flash references from the operating system, and the developers of the main browsers on the market, such as Chrome, Firefox and Edge, will gradually eliminate the plugin in the January 2021 versions, preventing users activate or install it.
In little more than a month, Flash will disappear completely from the Internet. But thanks to platforms like the Internet Archive, it will always be with us. And we can come back whenever we want to reproduce the animations or minigames with which, a decade ago, we spent so many hours.
