In it's prime, Flash helped give life to the websites we visited. Instead of just a GIF or flashing text, you could make your website much more interactive. The use of this plugin would ensure that a website would load exactly the same way for everybody who visits the page. With Flash, we saw the beginning of web based video, animations, and games.
When the first iPhone was announced in 2007, Apple also announced that the iPhone would not offer Flash support. The functionality lost as a result of this was not much of an issue, as the release of HTML5 was imminent. HTML5 would replace some of the functionality Flash offered, so developers began to move away from Flash. Later, in 2010, Steve Jobs published a note on his website justifying his reasoning for not supporting Flash. This plugin was insecure and resource-intensive, and Jobs believed that it's better to use open standards, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Despite this, Android still supported Flash, and you could still develop native apps for iOS. And on the web, many of Facebook's games were made on flash, and YouTube used Flash for video playback. However, HTML5 would soon be able to support video on YouTube. The idea of a plugin free internet was spreading. In 2011, Adobe stopped the production of the Flash Player for Android and released Edge Animate, a new way to create HTML5 content, which only made Flash more obscure.
In 2015, Adobe discontinued Edge Animate and renamed Flash to Animate CC. Now it would be the “premier web animation tool for developing HTML5 content while continuing to support the creation of Flash content".
Facebook became one of the last big users of Flash, however they were looking for an alternative. They had tried to create a library of HTML5 games in 2011, but quickly shut down the project. Although they are trying to distance themselves from Flash, their library of games is still up and running.
In an effort to move away from flash, Google has announced that from now on, Chrome will block Flash by default, with the goal of eventually blocking Flash altogether. I feel like Flash doesn't have a future on the internet. The alternatives have become used even more, and are beginning to perform better than Flash.
