No more Flash in December?

Adobe Flash Player will continue to work for desktop applications (e.g. .swf files opened through Flash Player) if you still have Adobe Flash Player on your desktop (though I'm not sure if you would still be able to download Adobe Flash Player from the official Adobe website after 2020), but I don't think Adobe Flash Player will receive any more updates. Most major browsers (e.g. Chrome, Firefox), however, will drop support of Adobe Flash Player (which includes the large library of Flash-based web games) by December 31st, 2020. There might still be some browsers that could support Flash after December 31st (maybe Internet Explorer since that browser doesn't receive updates anymore), but it wouldn't be of much use since most publishers will probably remove their Flash content from their website anyway to reflect the termination of Adobe Flash Player for browsers.

And another reason why Flash wouldn't exactly be "dead" is because of Adobe Animate, which is still common in the animation industry, but .swf files created in Adobe Animated would probably only be limited to the scope of the desktop. I don't know what plans Adobe has for Adobe Animate, but that application is still around as far as I know.

So in short, if people wanted to play Flash games, they'd probably have to do it through their desktop instead of their browser. I would imagine people will create a whole Google Drive or Dropbox of .swf files (of games) as some huge archive/preservation project until there's some standalone app that could run a bunch of Flash files.

At this point, people will have to move on to HTML5, WebGL, WebAssembly, and other browser resources. I haven't heard from what game companies that depend of Flash (e.g. ArmorGames, Kongregate, MiniClip, etc.) will do after 2020, but I suspect that they might create a desktop application (maybe through Electron) to allow users to access their library of games; otherwise, those companies might just shut down their website entirely.

 

I think the vast majority of arcade games on this forum won't work after 2020 since they run on Flash. I don't know a whole lot about Xenforo, but maybe they have support for games made in HTML5, so HTML5 games could be a consideration for the future of the forum arcade if plausible. But personally, I've found it a lot harder to encounter HTML5 games compared to Flash games; they do exist, but they aren't as abundant (probably because HTML5 is still new, but also because it's more of a learning curve for people to development games in HTML5).

 

It's now January and I have Flash Player running on Firefox. According to Adobe, they'll start blocking Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12th. But currently, you can't download Flash Player from their website, so the only way to run Flash applications on your browser is to already have Flash Player.

Not really sure what will happen since I don't know exactly how Adobe will detect if someone has Flash Player running on their computer. I'm guessing it'll be through an update via desktop, but maybe it's possible to turn off the update through services.msc. I've already went to Adobe Flash Player Update Service by running services.msc via command prompt, and have set the Startup Type to Disabled, so maybe that's good enough to prevent Adobe from updating Flash Player to where it's useless.

Only problem is, if a major browser performs an update, then the browser will probably void Flash Player from working. In my case, I would just use an older browser (like Internet Explorer), if Firefox officially ends Flash Player.

I don't plan on removing Flash since there are still a lot of web applications that utilize Flash (I think Balsamiq, a wireframe/mockup tool, still uses Flash) and there are Flash games that I enjoy playing on my spare time. Worse case scenario, there's always BlueMaxima's Flashpoint which will run Flash games, but it's really limited to the ~70,000 games that they picked out. You won't find proprietary Flash applications, newer Flash games, or Flash games that use their own underlying services to actually run properly.

 

As of today, January 12th, Flash is officially blocked from running in major browsers.

Spoiler: Attempting to play game on Y8

Current workaround for Windows users running Firefox:

1. Visit C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\mms.cfg
2. Inside of mms.cfg, edit to include the following:
   
   Code:

   EnableAllowList=1
   AllowListURLPattern=*://*.addictinggames.com/
   AllowListURLPattern=*://*.armorgames.com/
   AllowListURLPattern=*://*.gameogre.com/
   AllowListURLPattern=*://*.kongregate.com/
   AllowListURLPattern=*://*.miniclip.com/
   AllowListURLPattern=*://*.newgrounds.com/
   AllowListURLPattern=*://*.y8.com/
   SilentAutoUpdateEnable=0
   AutoUpdateDisable=1
   EOLUninstallDisable=1

   Save your file. (You can whitelist other websites that run Flash in this file)
   
   
3. Visit C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash
4. Inside the Flash directory, copy the mms.cfg and paste it in that directory.
5. Restart any running browser session.

As a precaution, I also recommend downloading the SuperNova extension and disabling Adobe Flash Player Update Service in services.msc.

Edit: Here is a Medium article that also mentions how to edit your mms.cfg for Google Chrome and other browsers.

 

Mozilla Firefox announced some time ago that it will end support for Adobe Flash on January 26, 2021 by releasing Firefox version 85. So if you're able to run Adobe Flash right now by modifying your mms.cfg settings, chances are you won't be in the near future when Firefox is updated and Flash support is removed.

I recommend using an older browser like Internet Explorer 8, if you still want to play Flash games on a browser, and just for that purpose. However, I wouldn't recommend using Internet Explorer 8 for browsing or doing other things since it is a security risk.

 

Ruffle's good, but I'm not sure how it interacts with certain web APIs, HTTP requests, scripts, and other browser-related things. Looking at their site under the Usage heading, it does seem like it has potential capabilities for running on websites, and their seems to be a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox. Might be something I'll try using.