Adobe dumps Flash as it marks shift to HTML5

Ding-dong the wicked witch is (almost) dead

Software giant Adobe renames Flash Professional "Animate" and shifts to HTML5 after prolonged and concerted criticism of persistent security flaws in Flash.

Those security flaws have been exploited by a wide range of players - from nation states, to makers of legal hacking tools, such as Hacking Team, to creators of malware and ransomware - in order to compromise PCs across the world, given the ubiquity of Adobe's Flash Player software.

Flash Professional, the tool with which Flash animations and applications are produced, already supported HTML5, but the renaming indicates that the company is preparing to kill the much-maligned core Flash software.

In a blog post explaining the changes in Adobe's Creative Cloud, the company explained its shift: "The use of open web standards and HTML5 has become the dominant standard on the web. Over the past few years, the Flash Professional CC [Creative Cloud] product team has embraced this movement by re-writing the tool from the ground up, adding native support for HTML5 Canvas and WebGL as well as output to any format (such as SVG) with an extensible architecture.

"This flexibility has been a huge hit with Adobe customers. Today, over a third of all content produced in Flash Professional CC is HTML5-based, reaching over one billion devices worldwide. In order to more clearly reflect its role as the premier animation tool for the open web and beyond, we updated the name."

IDC analyst Al Hilwa suggested that the move was a necessary one by Adobe as it continues to shift its focus to HTML5 tools: "This has to do with Adobe's successful pivot in the capability of its tools to support HTML5. The renaming of Adobe's animation tools reflects that it now emits HTML5 and is widely used for this purpose and so the new name reflects this important change in the capability and usage patterns seen by its users."

Flash was originally produced by software vendor Macromedia and introduced in 1996. Macromedia was acquired by Adobe in April 2005 in a $3.4bn deal. The Flash software proved popular with website designers wanting to introduce more interactivity. However, it was less popular with users, but lived on principally as a means for content creators to reasonably securely deliver video.