3 Adobe Flash alternatives as it's finally declared obsolete by end of 2020

Flash was one of the great early building blocks of the internet when it came to animated or video content for websites. It was one of Adobe’s finest inventions, and it served us very well for many years. Nothing anyone says about Flash now will take away from its many achievements.

However, there comes a time to say goodbye to everything, though, and the time to say goodbye to Flash has long since been and gone. It’s quietly been dropped by almost every major website you can think of during the past two or three years, and by the end of this year, it will officially be declared obsolete by Adobe.

For a select few of you, this is bad news. Flash is the only piece of software of its kind that you’ve ever worked with, and the idea of starting all over again with something new might terrify you. If you’re among that number, then don’t be afraid. Internet technology has progressed a long way in the past five years, and getting started with a Flash alternative is even easier than getting started with Flash was all those years ago. All you need to know is where to look and how to start – and that’s a task we can assist you with!

Of all the contenders to the Flash crown that currently exist on the world wide web, these are the three that we think are most likely to appeal to you.

HTML5

There isn’t a ‘universal language’ when it comes to the internet, and there probably never will be. HTML5 might be as close as we ever get. Put simply, you can now do everything in HTML that you used to be able to do with Flash. There’s no longer any need to attempt to cobble Flash and HTML code together – you can just tell HTML5 what to do, and it will do it. You can trace the rise of HTML5 back to the rise of online slots websites, which have sprung up everywhere in the past few years. Online slots games aren’t a new invention – they’ve been around since the turn of the century. They just weren’t as popular back then because every single online slots game had to load as a separate piece of Flash content. Now the leading sites and UK online slots blog use HTML5, hundreds of them can be stored in the same place with no need for separate wrappers at all. If it works for the casino companies, it can also work for you.

Pepper Flash Player

You’ve probably already noticed that Flash stopped working with Google Chrome a long time ago. That decision wasn’t entirely taken because Flash was coming toward the end of its useful life (although that fact certainly helped things along). It’s because Google preferred an alternative version of the Flash player, and threw its support behind that instead. It’s called the Pepper Flash Player, and it’s likely to survive past the end of 2020 and into 2021 and beyond.

We don’t know how sensible it is to create brand new content using the Pepper Flash Player, but it’s a workable replacement when it comes to accessing older websites that still use Flash, or providing your readers and viewers with a means of accessing your content if you still have Flash content on your existing site and you don’t want to remove it. Think of it as more of a patch than an outright replacement, but it will keep things working for now.

BlueMaxima Flashpoint

BlueMaxima Flashpoint is more than just an alternative to Flash. It’s also an archive where thousands upon thousands of old and discontinued Flash games have been saved for future generations. It’s even allowed for the continuation of some much-loved Flash game series in the absence of being able to carry on using Flash to make them. From the past few sentences alone, you should have been able to work out that BlueMaxima’s product is more focused on games than it is about everything else, but plugin games account for a huge part of Flash’s appeal. Making Flash games was a whole career for some people ten years ago – now their skills, like their chosen medium, are becoming obsolete. Flashpoint will be the last place you can find them once Flash is defunct, and it beats having to download and save all of your Flash games individually. More to the point, you can use it to keep the Flash content of your page working long after Adobe pulls the plug.

Whatever you choose to do about your Flash content, do something. Obsolescence, in this case, doesn’t just mean that Adobe is going to stop supporting the software and allow it to age out – it’s going to become blocked. Websites will simply refuse to load pages that have Flash content on them, and every time a new version of a browser is released, it will become one step further away from supporting Flash. The clock is ticking rapidly, and the end is coming. Flash has had an incredible run, but it’s reached the finish line, and it’s time for it to enjoy a well-earned retirement. We cannot stress these points enough!

From the options above, if we had to pick just one of them, we’d suggest looking at HTML5. Both Pepper Flash Player and BlueMaxima Flashpoint, well-built as they are, aren’t ways of staying ahead in the world of coding. They’re just a means of delaying the inevitable. If you don’t learn how to code in HTML5, you’ll eventually fall behind the curve when it comes to web development, and you’ll be just as obsolete as Flash is. It can be a little daunting when you start to learn it because the way that some of even the most basic code is written has changed, but once you’ve had the chance to get your head around it, you should find that it’s far more intuitive than the previous versions of HTML ever were – and they made plugin products a thing of the past. Get literate in HTML5, and join us in the 2020s!