Adobe Flash

In the early stages of the internet webpages were bland and boring. Web Designers were very limited on what they could do. The design of web pages was forever changed when Adobe released "Flash". Flash gave web designers the ability to include photos, animations, and interactive pages. Flash guaranteed that its content could be available on any computer.

The downfall of Flash

The downfall of Adobe Flash started with Apple's introduction of the iPhone and the iPad. Steve Jobs decided not to include the plug-in on the devices. The main reasons Steve Jobs did not include Adobe is because Flash , "had one of the worst security records in 2009", uses tremendous battery power, "does not support touch based devices", and finally Apple did not want a third party software company to control the layout of the internet. See Steve Job's  full letter here.

The brink of extinction

Adobe's Flash player was rapidly going downhill. The new HTML 5 had not helped it. Adobe stopped producing Flash and created the program Animate, for HTML 5 content. After this switch the last two users of Flash, Facebook and Youtube switched to more advanced HTML 5. At this time Google's new program Chrome, was expected to block Flash websites by default.

Into the Archives

After Flash had no practical use anymore there was no way to view these one-of-a-kind webpages. Internet Archivists are currently working of saving the beautiful websites by using emulators of previous browsers. This work is very challenging. Archivists have to find the right update of Flash that works with each webpage.