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Adobe Flash

Summary

Adobe Flash was a platform for web animation, games, video and interactive applications, made up of an authoring tool, the free Flash Player browser plug-in, the SWF file format and the ActionScript language. It began as FutureWave's FutureSplash Animator in May 1996, became Macromedia Flash that December and passed to Adobe in 2005. Adobe ended support for Flash Player on December 31, 2020, and its authoring tool lives on as Adobe Animate.

Web Building Encyclopedia · Software and platforms · Last reviewed October 22, 2026 · 9 min read

What Adobe Flash was

Adobe Flash was a software platform for animation, games, video and interactive content on the web. It was first sold as FutureSplash Animator in 1996, renamed Macromedia Flash the same year, and owned by Adobe from 2005.123 Adobe stopped supporting its Flash Player on December 31, 2020.4

“Flash” meant several connected things:

  • The authoring tool. A program for drawing, animating and scripting content, later sold as Flash Professional and since 2016 as Adobe Animate.5
  • Flash Player. A free browser plug-in, meaning an add-on program installed into a web browser to run content the browser cannot handle by itself.6
  • The SWF file. The compiled file the tool produced and the player ran. Macromedia’s 1997 annual report called the format “Shockwave Flash.”7
  • ActionScript. The programming language for Flash Player. Adobe’s documentation says it is compiled into bytecode, a compact set of instructions, that is stored inside SWF files and run by a virtual machine in the player.8

Flash drew with vector graphics: shapes stored as points, lines and curves instead of a grid of pixels. That kept files small. A 1997 report described the product as a tool for building “small, fast multimedia animations.”29

Flash and other plug-ins offered features that HTML, CSS and JavaScript only provided later, as Adobe acknowledged in 2017.10 When Adobe announced the end of Flash Player in 2017, it wrote that whole industries, “including gaming, education and video,” had been built around the technology.10

FutureWave and FutureSplash, 1993 to 1996

Flash began at FutureWave Software, a company in San Diego.2 It was founded in January 1993 by Jonathan Gay, Charlie Jackson and Michelle Welsh.1

FutureWave’s first product was SmartSketch, a vector drawing program. It was written for PenPoint, an operating system for pen-based computers, and later moved to Windows and the Macintosh.1

In May 1996 FutureWave released its second product, FutureSplash Animator, which made vector animations. They played in Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer through a FutureSplash plug-in, which the Web Design Museum names both the FutureSplash Viewer and the FutureSplash Player.111 Later in 1996 FutureSplash animations appeared on MSN.com, Disney’s Daily Blast and the official site of The Simpsons, according to the Web Design Museum.1

Macromedia, a San Francisco maker of web publishing tools, bought FutureWave to add Flash to its Shockwave multimedia player, Computer Business Review reported in January 1997.2

The Macromedia years, 1996 to 2005

In December 1996 Macromedia acquired FutureWave in exchange for 600,000 shares of its stock, its 1997 annual report says.7 FutureSplash Animator was renamed Macromedia Flash and joined the Shockwave family of players. The first version cost $250, ran on Windows 95, Windows NT and the Mac OS of the Apple Macintosh, and could import drawings from Macromedia’s FreeHand illustration program.2 The Web Design Museum dates the release of Macromedia Flash 1.0 to December 18, 1996.11

Macromedia’s 1997 annual report said Flash shipped with more than 200 MB of clip art, fonts and bitmap files, and supported synchronized WAV and AIFF sound.7

From animation to programming

Flash grew from an animation tool into a programming platform over its next versions.

  • Flash 4. ActionScript first appeared in Flash 4, Macworld reported in 2000.9
  • Flash 5 (August 24, 2000). Macromedia shipped Flash 5 at $399, or $149 as an upgrade.12 Its ActionScript syntax and structure were now “similar to JavaScript,” and it could exchange data in XML.9 The Web Design Museum calls it the first version with ActionScript 1.0 fully in place, and notes that ActionScript was based on ECMAScript, the standard version of JavaScript.13
  • Flash MX (March 15, 2002). Flash MX added video support and came with the free Flash Player 6 plug-in. It cost $499, or $199 as an upgrade.614
  • Flex (2004). Macromedia began shipping Flex, a presentation server and application framework for building business software on Flash technology, at the end of March 2004. Prices started at $12,000 for two processors, including annual maintenance.1516

Macromedia’s 2001 annual report said growth in revenue came mainly from sales of Flash and of Dreamweaver, its web page editor, and set a goal to “drive ubiquity of our Flash Player.”17

How far Flash Player spread

Macromedia and later Adobe regularly published figures for how many computers had the player installed:

DateClaimed reach of Flash PlayerSource
August 200092% of online users, more than 248 million people (an NPD study cited by Macromedia)Macromedia12
April 2004“The most distributed piece of software on the Web,” installed on about 98% of Web-enabled desktops, by Macromedia’s accountADTmag15
November 2006More than 700 million Internet-connected PCs and mobile devicesAdobe and Mozilla18
May 2008More than 98% of Internet-enabled desktops, and more than half a billion phones and mobile devicesAdobe19

These are the companies’ own claims, not independent counts.

Adobe and the Flash Platform, 2005 to 2015

On April 18, 2005, Adobe announced that it would buy Macromedia in an all-stock deal valued at about $3.4 billion. Adobe’s chief executive, Bruce Chizen, pointed to the “complementary functionality of PDF and Flash.”20 The purchase was completed on December 3, 2005.3

ActionScript 3.0 and the Tamarin project

Flash Player 9, released in June 2006, contained a new virtual machine for ActionScript 3.0.18 Adobe’s documentation calls ActionScript 3.0 “architecturally and conceptually different” from earlier versions. The new machine, AVM2, used a new set of bytecode instructions, while the older AVM1 kept running ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0 content.8

On November 7, 2006, Adobe gave the source code of this scripting engine to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla hosted it as an open-source project named Tamarin, which was to implement the planned fourth edition of the ECMAScript standard. Mozilla planned to use that edition in the next generation of SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript engine in Firefox.18 The engine included a just-in-time compiler, which turns bytecode into native machine code while a program runs.18

Video, desktop apps and open specifications

  • H.264 video. In December 2007 an update to Flash Player 9, code-named Moviestar, added H.264 video, the format used on Blu-ray discs, along with HE-AAC audio and hardware-accelerated full-screen playback.21
  • AIR. On February 25, 2008, Adobe released version 1.0 of AIR, the Adobe Integrated Runtime, code-named Apollo. It let developers build desktop programs with Flash, Flex, HTML and Ajax techniques. The same day Adobe released the Flex framework as open source under a Mozilla license.16
  • The Open Screen Project. On May 1, 2008, Adobe said it would remove restrictions on the use of the SWF and FLV/F4V video specifications and drop license fees for the next major versions of Flash Player and AIR for devices. Partners included ARM, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics, Marvell and Verizon Wireless.19
  • Apache Flex. The Flex software development kit was submitted to the Apache Incubator in 2011 and became a top-level Apache Software Foundation project on January 14, 2013.22

From Flash Professional to Animate

On November 30, 2015, Adobe said Flash Professional would be renamed Adobe Animate CC with its next release in early 2016. By then, Adobe wrote, more than a third of all content made in Flash Professional used HTML5.5

Animate could publish to HTML5 Canvas, WebGL, SWF, AIR and video, and to other formats such as SVG through extensions.5

What people built with Flash

Flash content ranged from short cartoons to full applications. The Internet Archive‘s description of its Flash collection lists animations, games and toys, interactive menus and navigation for websites, and “advergames,” advertisements that were complete games.23

  • Animation and games. Animations, games and toys make up the Internet Archive’s Flash collection, and gaming was the first of the industries Adobe named in 2017 as built around Flash.2310
  • Whole websites. Some sites were built entirely in Flash, with animated intros and menus. The Web Design Museum’s gallery of Flash sites from 2000 to 2005 holds 444 entries, including sites for the films Requiem for a Dream (2000), Donnie Darko (2001) and The Bourne Identity (2003).24
  • Website builders. Wix, founded in 2006, launched its Flash Editor in 2008 and was known for Flash products when it released an HTML5 builder in March 2012.2526 The wider story is told in website builder.
  • Video. Flash MX added video in 2002 and Flash Player 9 added H.264 in 2007. By May 2008 Adobe said more than 75% of broadcasters streaming video on the web used Flash technology.62119
  • Applications. Flex and AIR were aimed at business software, and companies such as FedEx, NASDAQ, eBay, AOL and The New York Times Company showed AIR applications at its 1.0 launch.1516

Search engines, accessibility and limits

Search engines had to learn to read the text inside SWF files. In 2008 Google described improved indexing of the text in Flash files. It said that at first it did not index Flash files embedded with SWFObject, a common JavaScript embedding script, or content loaded from separate resource files, and later added both.27

Flash could be made accessible to people using screen readers, but with limits. The W3C‘s Flash techniques for WCAG 2.0 explain that support worked on Windows, in Internet Explorer 6 or later with Flash Player 6 or later, and in Firefox 3 or later with Flash Player 9 or later. Flash Player also supported keyboard access, but it did not support Windows high-contrast mode or text resizing.28

The W3C page is no longer maintained, and it now tells authors to use HTML instead because Adobe stopped updating and distributing Flash Player at the end of 2020.28

The plug-in model also limited Flash. Adobe’s end-of-life notice points out that major browsers were phasing out plug-ins.4 The move from Flash to open standards between 2010 and 2021, including the role of phones such as the iPhone, is covered in end of Adobe Flash.

After the player: Animate, AIR and preservation

On July 25, 2017, Adobe announced it would stop updating and distributing Flash Player at the end of 2020. It said open standards such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly now offered many of the features that plug-ins had pioneered.10 Adobe ended support on December 31, 2020, and has blocked Flash content from running in Flash Player since January 12, 2021.4

Parts of the platform outlived the player:

  • AIR. In June 2019 Adobe began moving AIR platform support and feature development to HARMAN. Adobe kept security-only support for AIR 32 on desktop computers until the end of 2020.29
  • Animate. On February 2, 2026, Adobe told customers it would discontinue Animate on March 1, 2026. Two days later, after complaints from users, it reversed course and put Animate into maintenance mode.30 As of June 2026, Adobe’s FAQ says Animate remains available to current and new customers and will get security and bug fixes, but no new features.31
  • Emulation. Ruffle, an open-source Flash Player emulator written in Rust, runs SWF files on desktops and in browsers through WebAssembly, with no plug-in.3223 As of October 2026, its project site rates its support for the ActionScript 1 and 2 language at 99% and for ActionScript 3 at 90%, with 82% coverage of each player API.33
  • Archives. In November 2020 the Internet Archive began playing Flash animations and games in the browser with Ruffle, and had more than 1,000 Flash items in its collection at launch.23

Old Flash code has not disappeared from the web. As of October 2026, W3Techs still detects Flash on 2.8% of websites, even though Flash Player has been blocked from running Flash content since January 2021.344

Timeline

  1. Adobe puts Animate in maintenance mode instead of discontinuing it30
  2. Adobe begins blocking Flash content from running in Flash Player4
  3. Adobe ends support for Flash Player4
  4. Adobe announces that Flash Player updates and distribution will end in 202010
  5. Adobe announces Flash Professional will become Adobe Animate CC5
  6. The Open Screen Project lifts restrictions on the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications19
  7. Adobe releases AIR 1.0 and opens the Flex framework16
  8. Flash Player 9 update adds H.264 video21
  9. Adobe gives Flash Player's scripting engine to Mozilla as Tamarin18
  10. Flash Player 9 introduces the ActionScript 3.0 virtual machine18
  11. Adobe completes its purchase of Macromedia3
  12. Flash MX adds video support, with Flash Player 614
  13. Macromedia ships Flash 512
  14. Macromedia buys FutureWave and renames FutureSplash Animator as Flash7
  15. FutureWave releases FutureSplash Animator1

What it means for your website

Adobe stopped supporting Flash Player on December 31, 2020, and has blocked Flash content from running in it since January 12, 2021. Anything on your site that still depends on Flash no longer works for visitors.4

  • Check for leftovers. Look for .swf files, and for <object> or <embed> tags that load them, in old pages, banners, menus and video players. W3Techs still finds Flash on 2.8% of websites as of October 2026.34
  • Do not ask visitors to install Flash. Adobe itself strongly recommends that people uninstall Flash Player.4
  • Replace it with standard formats. Use HTML5 video for clips, images or CSS animation for effects, and HTML text for menus. If you still have the source files, Adobe Animate can republish them as HTML5 Canvas, though it is in maintenance mode and gets no new features.531
  • Keep the history if it matters. For an old game or animation you want to keep online, the Ruffle emulator can play many SWF files in the browser without a plug-in, but its support for ActionScript 3 is not complete.3233 Save the original files with your website backups first.
  • Gain search and accessibility. Text moved out of Flash into HTML can be read by search engines and screen readers without the limits Flash had.2728 See our notes on web accessibility and websites and SEO.

If an old Flash-era site is due for more than a patch, our guide to updating, redesigning or rebuilding a website helps you decide how far to go.

See also

References

  1. FutureSplash Animator. Web Design Museum. 2023-10-11. accessed October 22, 2026.
  2. Macromedia buys FutureWave to add Flash to Shockwave. Computer Business Review (Tech Monitor). 1997-01-08. accessed October 22, 2026.
  3. Adobe Completes Acquisition of Macromedia. CreativePro. 2005-12-05. accessed October 22, 2026.
  4. Adobe Flash Player End of Life. Adobe. accessed October 22, 2026.
  5. Welcome Adobe Animate CC, a new era for Flash Professional. Rich Lee, Adobe Blog. 2015-11-30. accessed October 22, 2026.
  6. Macromedia Ships Flash MX (Macromedia press release). MacTech. 2002-03-15. accessed October 22, 2026.
  7. Macromedia, Inc. Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended March 31, 1997. Macromedia, Inc., via U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR. 1997. accessed October 22, 2026.
  8. Introduction to ActionScript 3.0. Learning ActionScript 3.0, Adobe Flash Platform documentation, Adobe. accessed October 22, 2026.
  9. Get ready for Flash 5. Terri Stone, Macworld. 2000. accessed October 22, 2026.
  10. Flash & the Future of Interactive Content. Adobe Communications Team, Adobe Blog. 2017-07-25. accessed October 22, 2026.
  11. Macromedia Flash 1.0. Web Design Museum. 2023-03-12. accessed October 22, 2026.
  12. Macromedia Flash 5 Ships (Macromedia press release). MacTech. 2000-08-24. accessed October 22, 2026.
  13. Macromedia Flash 5.0 and ActionScript 1.0. Web Design Museum. 2023-03-13. accessed October 22, 2026.
  14. Macromedia Flash MX. Web Design Museum. 2023-10-11. accessed October 22, 2026.
  15. Macromedia ships Flex rich interface server. John K. Waters, ADTmag. 2004-04-07. accessed October 22, 2026.
  16. Adobe Releases AIR Runtime for the Desktop, Opens Flex. Kathleen Richards, Visual Studio Magazine. 2008-02-25. accessed October 22, 2026.
  17. Macromedia, Inc. Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2001. Macromedia, Inc., via U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR. 2001. accessed October 22, 2026.
  18. Adobe and Mozilla Foundation to open source Flash Player scripting engine. Mozilla Press Center, Mozilla. 2006-11-07. accessed October 22, 2026.
  19. Adobe and Industry Leaders Establish Open Screen Project (Adobe press release). MacTech. 2008-05-01. accessed October 22, 2026.
  20. Adobe to Acquire Macromedia (press release filed as Exhibit 99.1 to Form 8-K). Macromedia, Inc., via U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR. 2005-04-18. accessed October 22, 2026.
  21. Adobe intros Flash Player 9 with H.264 video support. MacTech. 2007-12-04. accessed October 22, 2026.
  22. The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Flex as a Top-Level Project. The Apache Software Foundation. 2013-01-14. accessed October 22, 2026.
  23. Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive. Jason Scott, Internet Archive Blogs. 2020-11-19. accessed October 22, 2026.
  24. Flash websites in the early 00s. Web Design Museum. accessed October 22, 2026.
  25. About Wix. Wix.com. accessed October 22, 2026.
  26. Wix.com Launches HTML5 to Its Free Website Builder Platform. ABC7 News. 2012-03-26. accessed October 22, 2026.
  27. Improved Flash indexing. Google Webmaster Central Blog. 2008-06. accessed October 22, 2026.
  28. Flash Techniques for WCAG 2.0. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). accessed October 22, 2026.
  29. The state of Adobe AIR. Adobe Communications Team, Adobe Blog. 2019-05-30. accessed October 22, 2026.
  30. After backlash, Adobe cancels Adobe Animate shutdown and puts app on maintenance mode. Sarah Perez, TechCrunch. 2026-02-04. accessed October 22, 2026.
  31. Adobe Animate maintenance mode FAQs. Adobe Help Center, Adobe. 2026-06-08. accessed October 22, 2026.
  32. Ruffle: Flash Player emulator. Ruffle project. accessed October 22, 2026.
  33. Ruffle compatibility. Ruffle project. accessed October 22, 2026.
  34. Usage statistics of Flash as client-side programming language on websites. W3Techs. 2026-10. accessed October 22, 2026.

Web Building Encyclopedia. First published October 22, 2026. Last reviewed October 22, 2026. Every fact on this page is linked to a source we opened. Spotted an error? Write to [email protected].