Adobe Flash Player
Adobe Flash Player (known in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome as Shockwave Flash) is computer software for viewing multimedia content, executing rich Internet applications, and streaming audio and video content created on the Adobe Flash platform. It can run from a web browser as a browser plug-in or independently on supported devices. Originally created by FutureWave under the name FutureSplash Player, it was renamed to Macromedia Flash Player after Macromedia acquired FutureWave in 1996. It was then developed and distributed by Adobe Systems as Flash Player after Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. It is currently developed and distributed by Zhongcheng for users in China, and by Harman International for enterprise users outside of China, in collaboration with Adobe.
| Original author(s) | FutureWave Macromedia | ||||||||||||||||
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| Developer(s) | Adobe Inc. Zhongcheng Harman | ||||||||||||||||
| Initial release | January 1, 1996 | ||||||||||||||||
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| Written in | ActionScript | ||||||||||||||||
| Operating system | Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Solaris, BlackBerry Tablet OS, Android, Pocket PC | ||||||||||||||||
| Platform | Web browsers and ActiveX-based software | ||||||||||||||||
| Available in | Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Korean, Turkish, Xhosa, Telugu, Vietnamese, Afrikaans, Yiddish, Zulu, and Arabic | ||||||||||||||||
| Type | Runtime system and browser extension | ||||||||||||||||
| License | Freeware | ||||||||||||||||
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Flash Player runs SWF files that can be created by Adobe Flash Professional, Adobe Flash Builder, or by third-party tools such as FlashDevelop. Flash Player supports vector graphics, 3D graphics, embedded audio, video and raster graphics, and a scripting language called ActionScript, which is based on ECMAScript (similar to JavaScript) and supports object-oriented code. Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge Legacy, in Windows 8 and later, along with Google Chrome on all versions of Windows, came bundled with a sandboxed Adobe Flash plug-in.
Flash Player once had a large user base, and was a common format for web games, animations, and graphical user interface (GUI) elements embedded in web pages. Adobe stated in 2013 that more than 400 million out of over 1 billion connected desktops updated to new versions of Flash Player within six weeks of release. However, Flash Player became increasingly criticized for its performance, consumption of battery on mobile devices, the number of security vulnerabilities that had been discovered in the software, and its closed platform nature. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was highly critical of Flash Player, having published an open letter detailing Apple's reasoning for not supporting Flash on its iOS device family. Its usage also waned because of modern web standards that allow some of Flash's use cases to be fulfilled without third-party plugins. This led to the eventual deprecation of the platform by Adobe. Flash Player was officially discontinued on 31 December 2020, and its download page was removed two days later. Since 12 January 2021, Flash Player (original global variants) versions newer than 32.0.0.371, released in May 2020, refuse to play Flash content and instead display a static warning message. The software remains supported in mainland China and in some enterprise variants.