Flash: Looking Back, Looking Forward

Thanks to this deal, Flash has become one of the most ubiquitous plug-ins on the Internet, and Flash content can be seen almost everywhere. Wired recently quoted an NPD Online worldwide survey from April 2006 stating that almost 98 percent of web users have the Flash Player installed on their PCs. The Netscape deal wasn't the only milestone that led to Flash's domination of the field, however.

The next major milestone, according to Mike Downey, Flash senior product manager, came in 2000 with Flash version 4. That involved the addition of the scripting engine. In version 5, the company rewrote the scripting language and called it ActionScript. It was aligned with the ECMAScript standard, like  JavaScript. This meant that any programmer who was familiar with JavaScript could work with ActionScript. Instead of simply creating animations, developers could now "create games, interactive presentations and full-blown apps," Downy explained. "That's when the entire Flash ecosystem radically changed."

Version 6 of Flash, which came out around 2001 or 2002, brought another big change: video support. This originally started as a pet project by one of SmartSketch's creators. As always, the trick was to keep the browser plug-in (Flash Player) small. Even today, Flash Player is still small, so it plays quickly for everyone who uses it. This is one of the major reasons that it has become the de facto video player on the Internet. The ability to watch video transparently is another reason. There's no clicking through screens to tell what media player or version of it you have.

Today, many high profile sites are designed around Flash, including leading edge sites such as YouTube. Whether companies that build sites on the forefront of technology continue to use Flash will help determine its future. In Adobe's view, however, the future doesn't rest entirely with video -- or at least, not with video as we think of it today.