Changes

Used by an overwhelming majority of websites in between the early 2000s to and the mid-2010s, Flash has been was very much the go-to platform for multimedia online cartoons and animationgames, being utilized especially popular for streaming video providers such as YouTube various entertainment sites and children's websites sites due to its rich content, and has spawned a its own subculture of animators and game developers as exemplified by the likes of Newgrounds. A number of popular animated series were SWF elements also animated using Flashproved to be a crucial tool for many multimedia hosting sites so that they could actually play audio/video inside a browser, most notably ''My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic''given the lack of viable alternatives in the pre-HTML5 days. However, ''Phineas and Ferb'' and ''Happy Tree Friends''around the start of 2010 YouTube started pushing really hard for HTML5 media elements, to name which have since become a fewstandard feature in modern browsers and single-handedly made Flash Player obsolete for multimedia playback.

In fact, Flash's popularity declined as a whole started declining steeply in the mid-to-late 2010s due to the rise of alternative (and open) web standards such as HTML5 and mobile device manufacturers dropping support for the platform, a prominent example being Apple, who publicly stated that iOS would ''never'' support Flash. Google followed suit when it dropped support for the platform in subsequent new releases of Android releases, and it didn't help that a series of security issues, coupled with Flash itself being a closed standard, led Adobe to wind down on Flash and retire it the official player in 2020. The Flash authoring toolkit, since renamed Adobe Animate, is still actively supported and has undergone a total market shift towards animators; a number of popular cartoon series are already produced using Animate, most notably ''My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic'', ''Phineas and Ferb'' and ''Happy Tree Friends'', to name a few.

[[wikipedia:NPAPI|NPAPI]]—in case you don't remember—is an obsolete browser plugin system that was used by designed to allow a bunch of different in-browser software platforms that tried to co-exist in the earlier days of the internet before , but it effectively existing existed only for the sake of Flash Player SWF players once the SWF format became properly dominant and pushed everything else out of the HTTP in-browser ecosystem. By With the shrinking relevance of SWF in the mid-late 2010s, the plugin system that the players relied on was increasingly seen as an ancient relic that modern browsers would be better off without. So, while Adobe was phasing out Flash Player in late 2020, NPAPI was also gradually being dropped by all the major browser vendors. It hasn't entirely disappeared (some smaller indie browser devs still maintain NPAPI in their own forks of stuff like Firefox and Chromium), but itthere's ''mostly'' dead nowadays. You may also notice that a lot of older Flash Player projects fizzled out around 2009-2010. One likely reason for that is because, before then, many multimedia hosting sites actually needed some type of SWF element to be able to play audio/video in a browser. The development of open-source alternatives was motivated by people not wanting an increasingly large part of the Internet to hinge on a single proprietary software platform, along with Macromedia/Adobe not necessarily seeing Linux support as a top priority. It wasn't until the start of 2010 that YouTube, in particular, started pushing really hard for HTML5 media elements, which have since become a standard feature in modern browsers and single-handedly made Flash Player obsolete for multimedia playbackno denying its obsolescence these days.