Adobe Flash:
Brief history
Flash Player was originally released in the late 1990s as a browser-based plug-in for displaying simple vector-based graphics and animations. It quickly gained popularity with animators as it provided a rich, creative medium for displaying animations on the web, something that, at the time, was difficult if not impossible to do directly in the browser.
Over time, Flash Player added new features and functionality that greatly expanded what was possible within the player specifically, and on the web in general. Some of these features include:
Animation
Vector-based graphics
Audio (including MP3)
Video
Microphone and webcam access
Low-level bitmap manipulation
Binary-based sockets
Strongly typed, class-based programming language
Hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D content
As new features were added, designers and developers would create new types of content for the web, which in turn ensured that users continued to install and use Flash Player. This became a virtuous cycle. Developers could create new types of expressive content because Flash Player offered new features with a near-universal reach on the web. Flash Player maintained ubiquity as users continued to install Flash Player because it provided access to some of the most expressive content on the web.
In 2008, Adobe released a desktop runtime that contained the core Flash runtime functionality. Named Adobe AIR, the runtime allowed developers and designers to create and deployed Flash based content as stand-alone applications, initially on desktop operating systems and more recently as native applications on mobile devices.
Flash Player "Next"
Over the past decade, Adobe has played an active role in the development of languages and virtual machines for web-based development. This includes the development and deployment of a number of virtual machines and languages via Flash Player, as well as active contributions and leadership to ECMAScript / JavaScript language drafts and specifications (including the current "Harmony"). Adobe maintains a world-class engineering team focused solely on next-generation virtual machine and language developments for web and multimedia runtimes.
Previous iterations of this document laid out a roadmap for exploratory virtual machine and language innovations from Adobe to be pursued via a rearchitected Flash Player (referred to as Flash Player "Next" and ActionScript "Next"). However, by its nature, this type of architectural innovation is disruptive and generally not backwards-compatible. As Adobe has learned in the past from transitions between generations of virtual machines (from ActionScript 2 to ActionScript 3), this places a high burden on developers who want to take advantage of features and APIs which may only be available via the new runtime, or which may require significant porting of content, frameworks, and libraries. Given this, as well as the growing importance of browser-based virtual machines, Adobe will focus its future Flash Player development on top of the existing Flash Player architecture and virtual machine, and not on a completely new virtual machine and architecture (Flash Player "Next") as was previously planned. At the same time, Adobe plans to continue its next-generation virtual machine and language work as part of the larger web community doing such work on web-based virtual machines.
