Search KoopaTV!

Translate

Thursday, December 31, 2020

RIP 2020, and RIP Adobe Flash Player and AIR

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - You're supposed to uninstall it already.

The final casualty of 2020 is Adobe Flash Player, which Adobe has announced the End of Life timeline of back in 2017. The official End of Life date is December 31, 2020, which means Adobe will no longer ship or support Adobe Flash Player, opening it up to security vulnerabilities and bad stuff. This also applies to the Adobe AIR runtime. Adobe will actively block Flash Player from working as of January 12, 2021, so they recommend you just uninstall it right now.

A significant part of Internet history was created using Flash, including videogame culture (as well as videogames) and whole websites (such as the Kirby Super Star Ultra Japanese website documenting Friend Bounce). (There's an excellent talk here about the history of Flash websites and the movement that drove their popularity.) Websites that care about preservation—and have the resources to do so—have been working for years on creating alternatives. It helps that they've at least had years of warning about the upcoming calamity, unlike the Chinese Communist Party Virus which swept Earth without warning. These alternatives include converting their Flash content to HTML5 or other formats, or creating Flash Player emulators, such as ruffle. Adobe has also allowed technology partner HARMAN to service corporate clients that have built some of their critical internal or customer-facing systems in Flash and Adobe AIR, so they can keep those running. HARMAN will actually bring it to version 33!

There are also websites that are incompetent, like KoopaTV, and maintained by a guy who made Flash games but doesn't have skills in other areas and doesn't have the time or motivation to learn them. That means not only are our games not preserved/properly converted to non-Flash formats, but we haven't made any new games since Soviet Missile Run in 2017 (which was an amazing game).

I should probably go uninstall Adobe Flash Player. All the browsers already put you through a bunch of warnings when trying to use it, and it'll be gone in two weeks anyway.


Uninstall Program Control Panel Windows 10 Adobe Flash Player AIR version 32
Inexplicably, despite taking this screenshot, Ludwig hasn't actually gone and uninstalled anything as of publishing.
Maybe he will right after?
Version 32 is the very last version to be published by Adobe.



KoopaTV at least survived 2020, but slightly more on that self-evident observation on KoopaTV's next newsletter release, scheduled for January 1, 2021.


A year later and KoopaTV's games still aren't preserved.

17 comments :

  1. Replies
    1. LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

      Delete
  2. I went ahead and installed Flash just now. My computer's been doing this thing for the longest time where it like, suddenly resets and when I look into why it says that the previous shutdown was unexpected. Sometimes the "previous shutdown" was just me turning off the computer last night, but sometimes it's timestamped at a moment when no shutdown actually took place.

    So, we shall see if Flash was playing a part in causing this, I suppose.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And yes, I did mean to say "uninstalled" not installed. Well, I know what I'm gonna ask for in the next Feedback Form I complete--the ability to edit my comments. >_<

      Delete
    2. ...Yeah, editing isn't gonna be a thing. >.>

      I still haven't uninstalled it yet. :x

      brb guess I should do that

      Delete
    3. While I was in the Control Panel uninstalling Adobe stuff (and Scratch 2 offline editor), I finally also uninstalled the McAfee bloatware by running an executable off McAfee's site, since you can't uninstall it via normal means.

      Feels good.

      Delete
  3. I've got some good news for you! Scratch has been updated to not use Flash anymore, so all your games should still work just fine. You should be able to make new games, too.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Some of them work, some of them (The Wonderful 1237) are a disaster because they display Lists, and how Lists are treated/their properties in Scratch 3 are different than Scratch 2, so it's basically unplayable.

      I dunno if they ever went and made an offline editor for Scratch 3 yet. Just had to uninstall 2's with the uninstalling of Adobe AIR.

      Delete
    2. Oh, whoops. I just went on Scratch to test if the site still worked at all. I didn't know that Lists were treated differently now. My bad.

      Delete
    3. Now, I haven't looked at my specific content in...a while, and I haven't been keeping up with what Scratch 3.0's changelog has been.
      But I do know that when they made the change it changed a lot, so... Yeah.

      I'm the kind of person who'll only want to do that kind of work if there's an offline editor, though. It's better for version control, and I'm just more comfortable with it.

      Delete
  4. 2021 is the Year of the Cow but that officially starts in February. We need to find the giant Miltank by then and have her use Heal Bell to finally cure Covid-19.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dynamax Miltank's Heal Bell turns into Max Guard. :(

      Unless there's... Gigantamax Miltank...!

      Delete
    2. That is why I wrote "giant" instead of "Dynamax." We just need a very big Miltank who can have the capability to use Heal Bell to heal the whole world simultaneously.

      Delete
    3. I dunno, if there was a normal Miltank that big, we'd know about her already...!

      How about Pokémon or people with Soundproof? They wouldn't be able to hear the Heal Bell. That includes some variants of Bouffalant!

      Delete

We embrace your comments.
Expect a reply between 1 minute to 24 hours from your comment. We advise you to receive an e-mail notification for when we do reply.
Also, see our Disclaimers.

Spamming is bad, so don't spam. Spam includes random advertisements and obviously being a robot. Our vendor may subject you to CAPTCHAs.

If you comment on an article that is older than 60 days, you will have to wait for a staffer to approve your comment. It will get approved and replied to, don't worry. Unless you're a spambot.