For those of us who know embarrassingly little about coding websites, creating rich media or displaying gaudy advertisements to cynical punters, Adobe Flash Player does just one thing: it makes repeated requests for permission to upgrade itself while making no apology for its own shortcomings.
“Adobe Flash Player is out of date,” says the box on the screen, prompting us to go through yet another installation process with the promise of greater security, though it's never made clear exactly what we're being protected from.
While we unwittingly enjoy the benefits that Flash may quietly bring us, from Spotify to the BBC iPlayer and beyond, we associate it primarily with being a massive pain in the neck. Flash! Arrgghh! It's neither the saviour of the universe, nor the king of the impossible. It's just annoying.
Enough websites use Flash for it to be an essential accessory for browsing the internet on a desktop machine, and that ubiquity still makes it a prime target for hackers trying to fling malware at us. To its credit, Adobe continues doggedly to patch the thing up, but other technology companies are becoming exasperated.
Mozilla temporarily disabled Flash in its Firefox browser a few weeks ago when a new bunch of exploits became known, while Facebook's chief security officer called on Adobe to put it out of its misery. This week, both Amazon and Google have taken steps to hasten its agonisingly slow demise: Amazon stopped accepting Flash ads on its website on Tuesday, while Google has implemented an “auto pause” feature within its web browser, Chrome, where Flash elements that aren't central to the web page need to be manually triggered rather than play automatically. That's effectively an ad blocker - and needless to say, that isn't ideal for advertisers.
It's been five years since Steve Jobs outlined his objections to Flash and the reasons for not allowing it on Apple's mobile devices. For end users it's a memory hog, a sapper of battery life, a security risk. For creators, it's a proprietary format that you have to pay Adobe to use – so why doesn't everyone use HTML5 instead, the alternative open standard trumpeted by Jobs back in 2010?
Well, it's been a slow transition, mainly because Flash is undeniably good at some stuff. Its content looks the same, regardless of the machine or the browser you're using. It's good at streaming audio and video and making those streams hard to rip.
And online advertisers have stuck with it because of various industry standards that are hard to dismantle. But HTML5 is definitely pushing Flash to the margins; while five years ago 28.9 percent of websites used some kind of Flash element, that's down to 10.3 percent. YouTube now defaults to HTML5 when you visit the website, and others are following suit. Mobile is the future, and mobile and Flash just don't coexist very happily.
Most of us can't tell the difference between Flash and HTML5 content. All we care about is that it works, that it doesn't expose us to hacking attempts, and that we don't have to keep upgrading it. Of course, we'll always be at risk of hacking via any number of other weaknesses in the software we use, and Flash will probably rumble on for a while, thanks to its use by many major porn sites. But we're reaching the stage where we might decide not to bother reinstalling Flash after all – and then never notice the difference. –The Independent