The Rise And Fall Of Flash

I still have a few old Flash projects somewhere on one of my hard drives. Every now and then I wonder if I could even run them today.

Twenty years ago, I was convinced I was building the future of the web. And honestly... I wasn't the only one.

When Flash Changed Everything

At university I already knew some HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The problem was that websites looked... primitive. CSS2 had obvious limitations and almost everything interactive required complicated workarounds.

One day a friend showed me Adobe Flash. What impressed me wasn't ActionScript. It was the IDE.

Suddenly animations, transitions and interactive interfaces were only a few clicks away. For the first time it felt like the browser wasn't limiting creativity anymore. The only limit was the designer's imagination.

Around the same time, while learning Java, I also discovered object-oriented programming through ActionScript. I was hooked.

It Felt Like The Future

I built websites for local music clubs where the music started playing the moment visitors opened the page. Looking back, that sounds like terrible UX. Back then, it felt modern.

Later I worked on Gemius Stream, a platform for measuring audio and video consumption. Flash was everywhere. It wasn't just another technology. It was the technology for building rich internet applications.

At that time, almost nobody questioned whether Flash had a future.

Then The Industry Changed

The first warning signs were surprisingly small.

Flash became so accessible that many designers started building animated advertising banners themselves. Unfortunately, many of them were horribly optimized. Opening a website with several Flash ads often made the CPU work so hard that the cooling fan sounded like it was ready for takeoff.

Then CSS3 arrived. Suddenly many visual effects no longer required Flash.

And then came the iPhone.

Once it became clear that mobile devices were the future and Flash wouldn't be part of that future, everything changed surprisingly quickly.

I Didn't Want To Let It Go

I'll be honest. I was afraid.

I genuinely liked Flash. I enjoyed working with it and I wasn't excited about learning yet another technology from scratch.

Looking back, I realize I wasn't really afraid of losing Flash. I was afraid of leaving my comfort zone.

The Pattern Keeps Repeating

Since then I've seen several technologies that promised to change everything.

Cloud computing. Blockchain. Microservices. AI.

Most of them truly changed our industry. Just not always in the way we originally imagined.

Blockchain was supposed to transform far more than finance. For a while it seemed like every industry would build something on top of it. Today it still exists and continues to evolve, but for most people it has become almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies.

AI may become the biggest transformation of them all. Or perhaps, twenty years from now, we'll smile at some of today's predictions just as I smile when I think about Flash.

I don't know. And that's perfectly fine.

Final Thoughts

These days I'm far less interested in predicting which technology will win. A much more interesting question is this:

Which skills will still matter twenty years from now?

I'm fairly sure that some people reading this article have never worked with Flash. Some of you may have heard its name for the very first time today.

That's probably the best proof of how quickly our industry changes.

This isn't a reason to stop learning new technologies. It's a reason not to build your entire professional identity around a single one.

Technologies come and go.
The ability to adapt stays.