Adobe Flash Player
Cause of Death
Assisted termination following a public execution notice issued by Steve Jobs in April 2010; death took a further decade due to the subject's stubbornness
Toxicology Report — Contributing Factors
Steve Jobs open letter "Thoughts on Flash" (Single acute exposure, 2010, ultimately fatal)
Security vulnerabilities: 1,078 documented CVEs (Chronic)
Battery drain on every MacBook from 2007–2017 (Environmental)
HTML5 canvas element (Competitive toxin, introduced 2014)
Last Words
""Adobe strongly recommends all users immediately uninstall Flash Player." — Adobe's official final statement, which is the software equivalent of a firing squad asking you to load the rifle"
Witness Statements
""I clicked 'update Flash Player' 400 times and got a toolbar I didn't ask for 400 times. I considered this a reasonable trade. The Flash content was worth it." — Web user, 1999–2017"
— Witness 1
""We built our entire business on Flash games. Millions of users. We were profitable. Then Apple launched the iPhone and didn't support Flash and within three years we had to rebuild everything or die. We rebuilt everything. It took five years. It was fine. It was absolutely not fine." — Flash game studio founder, speaking from experience"
— Witness 2
""The security vulnerabilities were real. But I want to be honest: we also just didn't like it. It didn't fit the aesthetic. It was messy and it crashed and it was not ours." — Former Apple employee, characterising no one in particular"
— Witness 3
""Flash was the entire internet between 2000 and 2010. Newgrounds, Homestar Runner, those weird games where you clicked on a cartoon. That was Flash. You can say what you want about the vulnerabilities. We had a better time." — Web historian, nostalgically incorrect"
— Witness 4
Could It Have Been Saved?
Technically, yes. The HTML5 transition was real and necessary, but Flash's execution was hastened significantly by Apple's refusal to support it on iOS, which established the precedent for every subsequent Apple device. By the time Adobe acquiesced to the direction of travel, the direction had been decided for them. The Bureau notes that Flash survived ten years after its public death sentence, which is a better survival record than most things Steve Jobs disapproved of.
Legacy
Flash was the democratising force of early internet creativity. Before YouTube, before high-bandwidth video, Flash was how animation, games, and interactive media existed on the web. Its death took approximately 100,000 works of early internet culture with it, most of which were not archived. The Bureau considers this a significant cultural loss, slightly offset by the fact that the majority of those works were extremely bad.
Bureau Epitaph
✝
Adobe Flash Player
1996-01-01 — 2020-12-31
"Here lies Flash Player. It made the early internet weird and wonderful and genuinely dangerous to install. We miss the weird and wonderful."