As a computer technician, one of the most common questions I am asked is “What is Adobe Flash Player?“Almost everyone has seen a message on their computer at some point telling them that Adobe Flash Player needs to be installed or updated, but few people seem to understand what it actually is or what it does.
Flash Player is an application that is currently developed and maintained by Adobe Systems. The original purpose of Flash Player was to play files that were created by another Adobe application called Flash. Flash was very popular in the 2000s for creating animations, videos, games, and other interactive web content.
Over the years, Flash has been criticized many times, for various reasons. Most famously, in April 2010, Steve Jobs published a document explaining his reasons for not supporting Flash on the iPad. He cited the proprietary nature of Flash, as well as technical issues with it. He also explained that if Apple supported Flash applications on iOS, it would severely hinder Apple’s ability to control the quality of the iOS experience. You can read the full document here.
Today, Flash content on the Internet has largely been replaced with HTML5. HTML5 is the newest version of the HTML coding language and includes new standards for displaying animated and interactive content. With these new standards, HTML5 can display just about everything that Flash used to, and more. HTML5 content is more efficient and open than Flash, and supported on virtually every modern Internet-enabled device. The main use for Flash today is to run older Flash-based games and applications that have not been converted to HTML5.
You may be thinking “If Flash is so old and most websites have moved past it, why does my computer keep telling me to install Flash Player?” That is a great question. In the last couple of years, various scams have emerged on the Internet where the scammer buys advertising space, and uses it to display a fake message indicating that Flash Player needs to be installed. As most people do not know what Flash Player is, just that it used to be important, this is a very effective scam. When the victim clicks on the advertisement, malware will be downloaded to their computer.
There are still some older websites that do require Flash Player to function properly, but these are becoming increasingly uncommon. If you do need to install Flash Player, make sure you are downloading it from https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ which is the only trusted source. If you ever have any questions about whether you need Flash Player or if a download is legitimate, feel free to email the Small Dog tech team at support@smalldog.com