Section 01 · 3 pieces
The day the plugin stopped
Flash was a plugin: a separate piece of software that intercepted a file type and ran it in its own sandbox. When Adobe withdrew it, everything built inside it stopped at once — and two volunteer projects went about keeping what they could.
- 01The day the plugin stoppedAdobe ended Flash support on 31 December 2020 and the runtime was removed from every major browser, taking an enormous body of work offline at once.
- 02Two projects, and neither of them was anybody's jobRuffle and the Flashpoint archive were volunteer efforts that preserved what a commercial decision had ended.
- 03What a runtime actually wasFlash was a plugin executing its own bytecode, which is why nothing in the browser could simply take over from it.
Every piece on the site, in one list: Everything, listed.