I asked for portfolio advice in another site and suddenly realized all my youtube and flash game engine experiments were inoperative. They each had a red warning symbol stating something to the effect the flash is infectious, and that it needed to be updated. I put off updating because of the effect, but clicked it and it took me to a strange webpage, and I put off downloading again. I seem to remember flash updating discretly in the past? Anyway, later I read in a Guardian article that the updates will not download on chrome and mozilla, it gives a “download unsuccessful” message. I have two game experiments with Flixel and if I remember Away3d, and all of my maybe 20 or so embedded youtube animations on my blog were transformed into a strange warning against flash, with no hint whatsoever that they were youtubes. I had to go get new embedding codes which are now Iframes. If I was Adobe I would maybe sue Google for 250 million dollars, because there must be hundreds of millions of youtube videos embedded across the internet that have been transformed into “flash warnings”. Plus all the flash games that need to be updated to html5. I myself contacted an old friend who is now a storyboard artist, and he probably thought my site infected his computer with flash malware, imagine 25 or so of these red alert warnings scattered throughout a blog. Here’s the Guardian article link: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/08/warning-adobe-flash-vulnerability-hacking-team-leak
my flash updated just fine on mozilla. infact firefox wouldn’t even play twitch or youtube until i updated flash. you need to update your flash.
https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html
just click on get the latest version.
They each had a red warning symbol stating something to the effect the flash is infectious, and that it needed to be updated. I put off updating because of the effect, but clicked it and it took me to a strange webpage, and I put off downloading again.
Your browser is blocking Flash content because there are security vulnerabilities in the version you have installed. If you don’t trust the link your browser provides you, go to https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and download the update there. You may want to uncheck that box for a “free” McAffee virus scan…
Anyway, later I read in a Guardian article…
Don’t consult the Guardian on technology-related topics.
If I was Adobe I would maybe sue Google for 250 million dollars, because there must be hundreds of millions of youtube videos embedded across the internet that have been transformed into “flash warnings”.
Your Firefox browser did that, not Adobe. If you use Google Chrome, Flash will be updated automatically. YouTube also uses HTML5 for video, not just Flash (see www.youtube.com/html5)
Plus all the flash games that need to be updated to html5.
Not going to happen.
I myself contacted an old friend who is now a storyboard artist, and he probably thought my site infected his computer with flash malware, imagine 25 or so of these red alert warnings scattered throughout a blog.
It’s indeed a clusterfuck, especially because a lot of malware tries to bait users with fake “update” and “virus” warnings. People are scared to do anything.
My advice for non-technical users is to just accept malware on their computers. Alternatively, never visit any websites and don’t use email.
I have chrome on my laptop, but I only really use Mozilla. I’ll check the official download page, the mozilla page looked very weird and unofficial to me, I seem to remember a black page with a 2 inch cartoon bear up in the corner urging me to download and thought “I don’t think so!” . I re-embedded all my youtubes with the new iframe code. What a nightmare for flash dvelopers though, pretty much effectively hidden from the general masses!
Flash might suck for web, but there is no better tool than Adobe Flash CSx to make 2D animated/interactive GUIs. Plus, Flash is what many video games use for UI, so it’s here to stay.
its not a nightmare. if you didn’t embed a virus your videos are fine. your videos if clean did not need an update, only the flash player needed an update, and the news was wide spread, on every tech site the vast majority of people knew to update. firefox, a mozilla product, refused to activate flash until i did the update and gave me a pop up to download it. my flash was messed up for maybe 5 minuets. download update, instal, restart firefox to take effect. that was it.
it was flash player that needed updated, not your videos. you did alot of work you didn’t need to, and if i had clicked on your videos i could have watched them fine since i did the update. if you have comments on your vid pages look at them. there probably aren’t any complaints about them not working because for just abut everybody else they were working.
yes it was an embarrassment for mozilla, they had a sever flaw that they had patched within an hour and used their security certificate to shut down flash for people that didn’t update. they protected their users to the best of their ability. frankly my hats of to them. they had it fixed before nortons even knew there was a problem. if it told you to update and you didn’t trust it, go to their website and verify. they didn’t try to hide it. and they made it as easy as 4 mouse clocks to fix. i would not hesitate to install more adobe products because of the way they handled it. they have human employees, humans make mistakes. they admitted their mistake promply, warned everybody, and fix it promptly. they did not try to weasle out of anything. i feel safer now than i did before finding out about the security flaw. i know how they are going to act next time they make a mistake. they are going to protect me before i even know i need protected.
i mainly use mozilla. and it took less than 5 minuets to fix following simple instructions of basically “click here now” 4 times, on mozilla / firefox. i wish every problem i have was that easy.
I love Flash too, I’m probably an aberration as I live in the mountains with a grueling ten mile hike to town for brief stints of laptop internet access. The last thing I think of when I get on the internet in town is updating my flash or youtubes video players, whereas regular people would have more time to work it out 
flash is dying, google has managed its own branch of flashplayer (pepper) for chrome for a while because adobe is to slow to fix serious vulnerabilities, latest one was quite serious.
So google has been a step ahead but is getting tired of flash all in all I think, i have worked with flash for 8 years as a dev and migrated to js not that big step. a bit less animation 
but at the end of the year it’s gonna be phased out in advertisement, I got a mail stating like january next year.
I guess you just host your flash games on your portfolio, but the portfolio site in itself I wouldn’t recommend anyone making it in flash since some years back. gonna limit lots of people browsing on hand-helds from watching your work.
If you are running Linux this warning will come up anyway since the latest version available lags a year or so behind the other platforms.
You shouldn’t get the warning if you update to the latest for Linux, which is version 11.2.202.491. The Linux version isn’t developed anymore by Adobe, but still gets security fixes. I’m on Arch Linux and I’m getting frequent updates for the flashplugin, which eliminate any warnings I’m getting when I haven’t updated.
Negative, the flash on my machine is up to date and Firefox still displays the warning…
Hm, no idea then. Weird, though.
I have a soft spot for Flash, as it was my first animation program… back when it was owned by Macromedia, and the internet was dialup. I still think it’s a good 2D animation program - and that that is what it was always meant to be. I don’t have the latest version but I’m surprised by how little it has developed in the hands of Adobe - almost like they didn’t know what to do with it, and didn’t want it competing with After Effects.
It’s still used for several TV shows - It’s still a good 2D animation package - but it has evolved surprisingly little in 17 years… mostly because people thought it was a online content embedding pluggin as oppose to a 2D animation program.
Having said that, Flash browser games are still pretty cool.
Vpaint looks interesting, doesn’t it?
2015
Asking is Flash is finished.
xD
Yes, Flash is finished.
I remember when Flash was “the Hype” to make animated Pages in. As of there is no better Tool to make 2d animated/interactive tools / GUIs is by todays standards not true anymore. We have something far stable, faster, more native -> HTML 5 /WebGL ( XML DOMs / CSS / JS -> AJAX ) which can do the same, faster, more compatible, and theoretically more. There’s already JS frameworks utilizing the stuff making it almost easer to use than Adobe Flash back then. And if your into Editors and ease of use - especially with Adobe CC you now have Muse working perfectly together with Aftre Effects / Photoshop et cetera. creating beautifully animated HTML5 pages (and if you add in your AJAX calls you can stream dynamic content off your php or whatever Serverside Language you choose.). Not to mention there are already alot of Game Engine’s using the Open Framework to do more than just a animated Page. ( Unity beeing here one of the most popular Examples ). Also Game UIs are not made with flash unless its maybe a starter for a game or the game is entirely written in flash. Interoperating Flash Drawcalls with any kind of Directx or even OpenGL Routines results in a hacky clusterfuck of context switches no sane programmer would want.
Cheers!
good riddance.
Yeah when Steve Jobs stated Flash is terrible and should be gone because it is a resource eater the web flipped out.
OUTRAGES!
Now Flash will soon die because somebody was also right with the assessment.
Sad - I really liked Flash when it came out but in the end it became in my opinion too fat and a HTML on the other side
matured a lot and web 3D is stunning today.
So honestly I don’t even see the need for Flash anymore.
This is total bullshit, all these technologies are broken junk and they don’t even come close to Flash in terms of reliability or compatibility. I really wonder if people who make such statements have experience with either technologies or if they’ve been brainwashed to the point where they can just ignore everything that is broken, just because it’s open “standards” (it’s barely standardized anyway). The fact that they’re open “standards” is the key problem. We need less “standards” and more low-level access. Thankfully, we might get rid of Javascript through WebAssembly, but I don’t see the clusterfuck that is DOM and CSS going away any time soon.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of Flash or proprietary web technologies, but for designing interactive content in predictable way, Flash outclasses “open” web standards by pretty much any objective measure.
When it comes to web developers though, considering what they inflicted upon us already, I’d rather have them have less tools for interaction rather than more.
Also Game UIs are not made with flash unless its maybe a starter for a game or the game is entirely written in flash. Interoperating Flash Drawcalls with any kind of Directx or even OpenGL Routines results in a hacky clusterfuck of context switches no sane programmer would want.
You’re wrong about that, Flash has been used in tons of AAA games through middleware such as Scaleform and Iggy.
Muse’s output is atrocious, and the file size of many Muse generated pages is ridiculously heavy and slow - not to mention how designers create pages which are a mess of parallax effects and animations: a throwback to old Flash sites (almost).
I agree with you that Flash offered a much more platform independent development tool. But let’s not forget that Flash (the plugin) could be a total train wreck at times as well: in the past decade Flash was (is) one of the only reasons my Windows machine and browsers would crash. Adobe did and is doing a terrible job maintaining the Flash plugin, and pretty much single-handedly destroyed the Flash web platform in my opinion.
As for “html5” and javascript: Sure, it is not perfect, but it is the best we got at this point. When webGL is available in a browser, display performance is almost up to par with desktop performance, and more than suffices for 90% of applications. Tools such as Construct2 help in creating games and other interactive apps which perform quite well in all desktop browsers (well, I have had issues with Opera), and the mobile situation has been improving quite a bit in the last few years1.
Compared to the situation we as web devs had to deal with during the IE6 era, I’d say things have tremendously improved. Although I am looking forward to byte code support for the browsers as well. Flash does a couple of things that I sorely miss in “html5” and js (secured video, for one, video with alpha channels, etc.).
Flash, however, never scaled to content design and structure very well at all - at its heart it is still an animation app. With html and css it is easy and efficient enough to deal with content (structure and styling), and it scales well in a variety of environments (desktop and mobile) - unless someone decides to use a hopeless tool such as Muse, of course. Sass helps out with some of the deficiencies of CSS. Is it perfect? Nope. Is it wholly usable for what we use it for? Yep. More than good enough.
The question is not to ask whether a tech is broken or not, but rather: is it good enough to do the job at hand in? That has been humanity’s approach throughout its history. No single technology, software application, or framework will be perfect - I am pretty sure once Webassembly becomes available, we’ll see a new spur of issues and detractors pop up. And many corss-browser compatibilities. Probably.
Nope, it does not. Not with content design. Therein lies the rub with Flash. Content design is as much part of interactive content as anything, and Flash was (is) quite horrendously ill suited for this. And it is very questionable that you assert this in relation to other areas of interaction as well, such as usability and UX design. Interactive content is about more than merely being able to put thousands of moving objects at 60fps on the screen.
Web developers did not inflict anything on anyone - you still have a choice to limit yourself to a very small subset of tools and technologies.
Just to be clear, I’m talking about the kind of content that Flash has historically been used for, where HTML5 is supposed to replace it, but is clearly inferior (canvas, vector Graphics, animation, media). I’m not saying Flash is better for making websites (although I would say it is better at making “classic” user interfaces).
I’m also not saying Stage3D is better than WebGL. They’re both bad, but with WebGL there is room for improvement.
Also: predictability and reliability are really important, and as soon as you go into the more “fancy” areas of HTML5, things get flaky really quick. Flash fares far better here.
Web developers did not inflict anything on anyone
Some of the websites I use regularly (some of them by multi-billion dollar companies) are horrible to use. If they toned down all the flashyness a bit and didn’t try to jquery-animate the fuck out of everything, maybe I’d get to have a more pleasant experience. (Note again I’m not saying they should use Flash everywhere)