<p> <i> 19.16 pm </i>

Flash is dead, and YouTube dealt the killing blow

Flash is dead, long live Fl– actually, no, scratch that, Flash really is dead and it deserved to die. Flash is terrible.

The killer blows to Adobe’s multimedia browser plugin were delivered this week in a one-two punch. Firstly, users of Flash were left open to not one but two “zero-day” vulnerabilities in the same week, affecting users of Chrome, InternetExplorer and Firefox. Almost immediately, hackers were able to abuse these flaws to dump malware on Windows PCs, which led Mozilla to disable the plugin entirely until users had updated to a secure version.

Then on Tuesday, YouTube – the biggest provider of Flash video ever – announced that it would stop serving its videos using the plugin for anyone visiting the site in a modern browser.

“There were limitations that held it back from becoming our preferred platform for video delivery,” wrote the site’s engineering manager, Richard Leider, four years ago. “Most critically, HTML5 lacked support for Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) that lets us show you more videos with less buffering.

“Over the last four years, we’ve worked with browser vendors and the broader community to close those gaps, and now, YouTube uses HTML5 by default in Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and in beta versions of Firefox.”

The writing has been on the wall for Flash for almost a decade – ever since the iPhone launched in 2007 with no support for the plugin. At the time, Apple was lambasted for its absence; the company worked with Google to create a standalone YouTube app, but many other sites were only partly functional until they bowed to user pressure and built “mobile friendly”.

Three years later, the pressure was such that Steve Jobs wrote a rare missivepublicly addressing the company’s continued refusal to include the software. “Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice,” he argued. “Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low-power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.”

A year after Jobs’ letter, Adobe killed the mobile Flash player for Android devices, fully retreating from the post-PC world.

With YouTube following suit, it doesn’t look like long until the player is a relic of an internet past. But before we all uninstall it, maybe it’s time to look back at the great hits of Flash gone by.</p>