Flash, (Adobe Flash since 2005), the software underlying many multimedia projects on the Internet, will no longer be supported by browsers.

In its heyday, Flash had many things going for it: ease of use, the ability to compress down massive files, and shift playback quality to adjust to a wide variety of machines. Nearly every browser could be expected to have a “Flash Plugin," and thousands of people were experimenting with it to make art and entertainment. 

In November 2011 Adobe announced it was ending support of Flash for mobile web browsers, and in 2017 they announced that Flash would be discontinued altogether by sometime in 2020. That time has arrived.

However, Flash is not going away completely! It will be preserved in a collection at the Internet Archive. Read more about it: "Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive." There are instructions on this page for artists and creators to upload their own .swf files to the Archive.

(On the right: the Badgers Flash animated meme by Jonti Picking, published on Sept. 1, 2003, was rated one of the top Internet fads of all time by PC World in 2009).