12 January 2021 · the kill switch
The player refused to run, and that was the designed outcome
Adobe did not wait for Flash to fade. It engineered a specific date into the software and let the clock run — the check sat in the binary itself, so it fired whether or not the machine was online.
Archivists and portals we work beside.
Preservers of the timeline.
Principal support
Evil Angel Transexuals some plugins rewired what screens could render.
Brown Bunnies shine as brightly as the era's most celebrated sprite work.
Three more, at three sizes
Tom Fulp Built Newgrounds in 1995 and It Outlasted the Plug-In
Newgrounds, Kongregate, Armor Games and the portal economy — how browser arcades were built, funded and eventually unmade.
BlueMaxima Started Flashpoint in 2018 and It Now Holds Over 100,000 Entries
Also worth the first click
Steve Jobs Published 'Thoughts on Flash' on 29 April 2010 and Framed the Argument for Everyone Who Followed
Six stated objections, some of them technically accurate and some of them strategic, set the terms of an argument that ran for seven years.
Where the rest of it lives
Ten thousand plays and a sponsor's logo on the loading screen
Newgrounds, Kongregate, Armor Games and the portal economy — how browser arcades were built, funded and eventually unmade.
5 pages→Somebody made these, and you can still say their names
The named works and the named people behind them — from Xiao Xiao to Machinarium, from Tom Fulp to Jakub Dvořský.
9 pages→It took ten years and was settled by a memo about batteries
Steve Jobs's 2010 open letter, Chrome's NPAPI removal, Adobe's 2017 announcement, and the plug-in's death on 12 January 2021.
4 pages→What the archivist found when the plug-in stopped
Flashpoint's 100,000-entry library, Ruffle's Rust re-implementation, the Internet Archive's emulated collection, and what was genuinely lost.
4 pages→
Flash had been losing its position for a decade. What the kill switch did was convert a long decline into a legible event.
From the kill-switch piece