It was 1999 and even though we weren't partying like it was that year I did see something amazing for the first time. A website designer I knew showed me his newest site, it loaded in a mere 20 seconds, and it had amazing "videos" with beautiful graphics moving around, looking very pretty...and it hadn't taken 5 minutes to download.
It was using a thing call Flash. Today we farewell flash as it has been replaced.
Computer browsers used flash more than any other media player, so whether you were on your desktop or laptop or tablet flash was making the pictures move. When you went on YouTube, it was flash. When you went on a fancy looking website with animations, it was flash. All those fun games you like to play (my favourite was Bloons Monkey Towers) were all based on a foundation of flash.
Adobe (who bought it from Macromedia) flash made video 10x smaller (big simplification there) and therefore much quicker to download and display.
But in the late 2000s it started having problems, specifically, security problems. It became all too easy for hackers to use the platform to infect your computer with viruses. So all the updates and patches starting flooding out of Adobe to protect you from viruses while enabling you to keep watching kitten videos on YouTube and playing balloon popping games.
When 2015 rolled around and YouTube decided to ditch Flash and use HTML5 instead, I figured the writing was on the wall for this platform. As of December (2020) Chrome no longer supports flash at all and wants you to remove it. Since Adobe isn't fixing the security issues, it's a good idea to uninstall Flash and thus avoid viruses and hackers possibly using that as a way into your computer.
1. Click Start
2. Click Settings (the cog symbol)
3. Click Apps
4. Scroll down and click on Adobe Flash
5. Click uninstall
If this is all too confusing for you, feel free to bring your laptop, desktop, MacBook or iMac into us, and we'll remove Flash for you. While it's in we can check the rest of your security too with our unique 28 point health checkup and keep you safe from any other issues.