We all remember that Adobe Flash Player reached the end of its useful life on December 31, 2020, which marked the end of this technology that was a sensation at the time. And even what We could all believe that we would never know about the Flash again, the reality is different, since he is not quite dead, since Flash is still available in China and for businesses.
This is because the project team "Clean Flash" took advantage of this situation to continue making the software available worldwide. It for his part was not to the liking of Adobe and which led him to issue a DMCA request to request the closure of the open source project.
In fact, Although Adobe has stopped distributing new global versions of Flash, the technology is still supported in two markets: the entrepreneur and the Chinese, via Flash.cn. However, the problem is getting a working copy of Flash outside of China or companies, which is also safe with frequent updates and does not pose any risk to users' machines. The Clean Flash project team accomplished this by configuring an installer without relying on the Flash Helper system service used by Adobe to disable a particular version of Flash. Therefore, Adobe issued a DMCA request to request the closure of the project on GitHub.
“Adobe is the copyright owner and I am authorized to act on its behalf. Our Adobe Flash Player software has been violated. The files in question contain copyrighted material owned by Adobe Inc. (software code), ”says the publisher's legal counsel.
For its part, Chrome played an important role in setting web development trends. Through an ad related to version 55 of the Chrome browser, in which Google confirmed its position to use HTML5 to replace Flash. In addition, it is not the only one that defines the position of Google. In fact, the first tests on the generalizability of HTML5 on YouTube go back ten years.
Apple spoke on the subject in 2010, highlighting that “although the operating system for iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we firmly believe that all standards related to the web should be open. Instead of using Flash, Apple adopted HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, all of which are open standards.
All Apple mobile devices come with high-performance, low-power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard adopted by Apple, enables other web developers to create advanced graphics, fonts, animations, and transitions, without having to rely on a third-party plug-in (such as Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a committee of which Apple is a member. »
Thus, along with HTML5, which Google has chosen, JavaScript includes the list of technologies to be considered in a migration code bases that still depend on Flash. Also, the Haxe programming language can be a good complement for ActionScript developers.
With the WebAssembly language, whose Core specification recently became a web standard, developers have an additional option. With WebAssembly we anticipate more security and speed, but you have to learn C, C ++, Rust, Java or C # to be able to run code on the web.
Regarding the options available at the moment, we still have ruffle, which is one of the options available to people who want to continue using Flash, since as such it is a Flash Player emulator written in Rust. Ruffle works natively on all modern operating systems as a standalone application and in all modern browsers by using WebAssembly.
This would be an additional alternative offered to third parties who wish to continue using Flash. For questions about which Flash components are licensed and which Adobe may not be able to release, Adobe could leave a note on which components will be removed. These can then be omitted or replaced with open source alternatives.
In any case, Adobe's openness to Flash in the developer community is controversial. On the one hand, some argue that tens of thousands of games and media depend on Flash, and that also for historical reasons, using open source is a good idea. This should also save many hours of work.
Others find this idea ridiculous considering it's time to ditch Flash and making it open source will only keep it alive forever.
Source: https://github.com