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|title = Adobe Flash|logo = Adobe_Flash_Logo.png|developer logowidth= Adobe160|type = |generation developer= Adobe|release = 1996|discontinued = 2020|predecessor =

'''Flash''' (previously FutureSplash Animator, before that SmartSketch) is a software platform created by FutureWave Software, and is currently owned by Adobe (previously formerly Macromedia). Originally a drawing program for PenPoint OS, later ported to Windows and Macintosh when pen computing failed to take off, frame-by-frame animation features were added to it in a new program called FutureSplash Animator. The company was acquired by Macromedia in December 1996, rebranding FutureSplash Animator to Flash, an amalgamation of "Future" and "Splash". In turn, Macromedia was acquired by Adobe on December 3, 2005. Their operations, networks, and customer care organizations were merged shortly after.

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 utilised 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 SWF elements also proved to be a crucial tool for many multimedia hosting sites so that they could actually play audio/video inside a browser, given the lack of popular animated series were also animated using Flashviable alternatives in the pre-HTML5 days. However, most notably ''My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic''around the start of 2010 YouTube started pushing really hard for HTML5 media elements, ''Phineas which have since become a standard feature in modern browsers and Ferb'' and ''Happy Tree Friends'' to name a fewsingle-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 will 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, has 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.

; If you don't want to mess with these tools, just use [[Flashpoint]] - preservation effort for games and animations designed in commercial web frameworks (not just Flash).<div style="overflow-x:auto;width:100%">{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;width:100%"! scope="col"|Name! scope="col"|Platform(s)! scope="col"|Latest version!scope="col"|[[#ScaleForm GFx|ScaleForm GFx]]!scope="col"|[[#Adobe AIR|Adobe AIR]]! scope="col"|<abbr title="Free/Libre and Open-Source Software">FLOSS</abbr>! scope="col"|Active! scope="col"|[[Recommended Emulators|Recommended]]

! colspan="68"|Desktop / Plugin <ref group=N name=plugin>Plugin versions of these players require a browser that supports & NPAPI/PPAPI.</ref>

|align=left|{{Icon|Windows|Linux|macOS|Web}}<ref group=N name=plugin>Web version requires a browser that supports NPAPI.</ref>|[https://web.archive.org/web/20220331041116/https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.html 32.0.0.465]|{{~}} <ref group=N name=scaleform>Requires the third-party software component to access it.</ref> ||{{✗}} ||{{✗}} ||{{~}} <ref group=N>Adobe versions discontinued. Harman versions are currently maintained for enterprise customers only.</ref> ||{{✓}}

|[https://rufflegitlab.rscom/ cleanflash/installer Clean Flash Player]|align=left|{{Icon|Windows|Linux|macOS|Web}}<ref group=N name=plugin/>|[https://github.com/darktohka/clean-flash-builds 34.0.0.289] (Windows, Mac)<br />[https://github.com/darktohka/clean-flash-builds/releases/tag/v1.7 34.0.0.137] (Linux)|{{~}} <ref group=N name=scaleform/> ||{{✗}}||{{✗}} ||{{✓}} ||{{✓}}|-|[[Ruffle]]

|[https://ruffle.rs/#downloads Nightly builds]|{{~}} ||{{~}} ||{{✓}} ||{{✓}} ||{{~✓}}<small> (WIP)</small>

|align=left|{{Icon|Windows|Linux|Web}}<ref group=N name=plugin/>|[https://github.com/lightspark/lightspark/releases 0.8.67]|{{✗}} ||{{~}} [https://github.com/lightspark/lightspark/blob/master/src/main.1cpp#L365 *]||{{✓}} ||{{✓}} ||{{~}}<small> (WIP)</small>|-|Moco|align=left|{{Icon|Windows}}|[https://github.com/naomiEve/Moco git]|{{✗}} ||{{✗}} ||{{✓}} ||{{✗}} ||{{✗}}

|{{✗}} ||{{✗}} ||{{✓}} ||{{✗}} ||{{✗}}

|align=left|{{Icon|WindowsWindows7|macOS|Linux}}

|{{✗}} ||{{✗}} ||{{✓}} ||{{✗}} ||{{✗}}

|align=left|{{Icon|Linux|Web}}<ref group=N name=plugin/>

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! colspan="68"|HTML5 / WebAssembly

|[[Ruffle]]

|{{~}} ||{{~}} ||{{✓}} ||{{✓}} ||{{~✓}}<small> (WIP)</small>

|{{✗}} ||{{~}} ||{{✓}} ||{{✓}} ||{{~}}<small> (WIP)</small>

|[https://vidkidz.github.com/vidkidz/waflash io WAFlash]| {{naNa}}|{{✗}} ||{{✗}} ||{{✗}} ||{{✗}} ||{{~}}

|{{✗}} ||{{✗}} ||{{~}} ||{{✗}} ||{{~}}

|[https://docs.leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/Changelog Version 3435]|{{✗}} ||{{✗}} ||{{✗}} ||{{✓}} ||{{✗}}

|{{✗}} ||{{✗}} ||{{✓}} ||{{✗}} ||{{✗}}

|{{✗}} ||{{~}} ||{{✓}} ||{{✗}} ||{{✗}}|-!colspan="8"|Mobile|-|[[Ruffle]]|align=left|{{Icon|Android}}|[https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle-android git]|{{~}} ||{{~}} ||{{✓}} ||{{✓}} ||{{✓}}|-!colspan="8"|Consoles|-|FGP3|align=left|{{Icon|PS3}}|[https://github.com/DropSonic0/Flash-Player-PS3-Store 1.06]|? ||? ||{{✓}} ||{{✓}} ||{{✓}}|-|PSP Flash Player|align=left|{{Icon|PSP}}|[https://archive.org/details/swfplayerv13.7z v13]|? ||? ||{{✗}} ||{{✗}} ||{{✗}}

;[[Ruffle]] <smallclass="plainlinks" style="font-weight:normal;"> ([https://ruffle.rs/demo/ web demo]) ([https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues/310 avm1 compatibility]) ([https://ruffle.rs/avm2.html avm2 compatibility])</small>:A Rust-based player that targets both HTML5 and desktop. Notably Ruffle has been able to run many early Flash games since 2021, and the main development focus is now on support for newer AVM2-based files, although that's still far from complete as of 2024. Unlike the other HTML5 options, Ruffle can be installed as a WebExtension in browsers that support it, with the caveat that a website's hosted copy will sometimes override the extension even if the site is running an older build.:Ruffle has become hugely popular as an alternative SWF player, being notably used by a bunch of veteran Flash content sites including [https://www.newgrounds.com Newgrounds], [https://homestarrunner.com Homestar Runner] and [https://www.coolmathgames.com CoolMathGames], and also by the Internet Archive's [https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash Flash library]. By 2021, it had progressed to It's also the point where it can run many early Flash games, including most actively developed and arguably the original Flash version most accurate of [https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/59593/format/flash?emulate=flash Alien Hominid]; support for newer AVM2the open-based files source players that are available today, so this is now underway, although still far from complete. Unlike the other HTML5 options, Ruffle can actually be installed as a browser addon, likely your next best option if you don't want to bother with the caveat Flash Player or anything that a website's hosted copy will usually override the addon even if the site is running an older buildbeen forked from it.

[[wikipedia:NPAPI|NPAPI]], in —in case you don't remember, is remember—is an obsolete browser plugin system that was used by designed to allow for interactive web-page elements beyond what early versions of HTML could do on their own. While there were a bunch of different in-browser software platforms that tried to co-exist existing in the earlier days of the Internetinternet, before basically NPAPI effectively existed only existing 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 being seen as an ancient relic that modern browsers would be better off without; , and so, while Adobe was phasing out Flash Player in late 2020, NPAPI was gradually started being dropped phased out by all the major browser vendorsin late 2020 (around the same time that Adobe was preparing to drop Flash Player itself). It NPAPI hasn't entirely disappeared (gone away though, as some smaller indie browser devs still maintain NPAPI it in their own forks of stuff like Firefox and Chromium), but it is ''mostly'' dead nowadays. You may also notice that a lot of older Flash player projects specifically 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 play audio and/or 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 completely redundant for multimedia playbacksuch.

:The proprietary reference player, which Adobe stopped directly supporting at the end of 2020and has since fully delisted from their website. The plugin version has basically been delisted from Adobe's website and also has a built-in kill-switch that was flipped in January 2021, so it's probably not much use even in browsers that still support NPAPI. However, but the discontinued desktop player version is still available for usable if you download it from an archived version of the debug downloads section of Adobewebsite. It's website, and also worth noting that the player hasn't been completely discontinued: Harman International is also continues to maintain [https://airsdk.harman.com/flashplayer maintaining an extended support version specifically ] intended for enterprise users; and there's also a consumer-level Chinese version which is actively developed by Zhongcheng, although you shouldn't get it from their official site (Flash [dot]cn) because it'll be full of bundled malware.:Despite the hard discontinuation and a lack of support for user-friendly features such as URL spoofing, Adobe's Flash Player still remains the most widely-compatible desktop player for Flash games as of 2023, which is why the [[Flashpoint]] preservation project still relies on Flash Player to run its SWF games.:;Clean Flash Player::An unofficial effort that takes the still-active Zhongcheng version of Flash Player and repacks it minus as much malware as the Clean Flash project can remove. This might be the better option if you're looking for an NPAPI player specifically.

:A C++ player that's designed specifically to provide drop-in FLOSS replacements for both the desktop and NPAPI versions of Flash Player. It claims to have 83% of the overall SWF spec covered, as of August 2022, but development has been fairly slow ever since 2015 when it became a mostly one-person effortcirca 2015. Lightspark historically focused on more recent versions of the SWF spec that weren't supported by Gnash, hence why Lightspark could (and still can) use Gnash as an automatic fallback if both are installed simultaneously.

;GameSWF:An ''extremely'' old C++ player, definitely one of the first serious efforts to reverse-engineer Flash Player into an open-source package. Inactive since 2009, though it did lay the foundations for Gnash. ;& swfdec:Another Two very early effort efforts to create an non-proprietary replacement replacements for the desktop Flash Player. Actually pretty advanced for 2008-09, but it hasn't been active both inactive since2009 and very much obsolete nowadays. Gnash began as a fork of GameSWF.

Pretty much all of the players listed here are specifically designed to be used as [[wikipedia:Polyfill (programming)|polyfills]] by webmasters who want to keep their Flash-based sites going despite the forced obsolescence of Adobe's in-browser Flash plugin. They are , therefore , largely not intended for personal use, although it's usually not impossible and some of them even have official demo pages that you can use to load whatever SWF file you want.

:A proprietary software package designed to make the Harman version of Flash Player usable in modern browsers by running it inside CheerpX, a payware x86 emulator in WebAssembly. No-one on this wiki has had the chance to properly evaluate it, but we'd expect reference-level accuracy at the cost of woeful performance. That being said, CheerpX apparently has an alternate mode of operation can also function as a streaming client to a bundled server app that offloads most of does the emulation and processing work to a server app, at which point the in-browser part is effectively just a streaming clientinstead.

;AwayFL<smallclass="plainlinks" style="font-weight:normal;"> ([https://exponenta.games/games/AFL/ web demo])</small>:Developed by the Away Foundation, this is arguably the most direct alternative to Ruffle, which although it's roughly even with has fallen behind in terms of compatibility although there are still a bunch of SWFs that'll work fine in one but not the other.

;WAFlash<smallclass="plainlinks" style="font-weight:normal;"> ([https://clubpenguinadvanced.github.io/waflash-demo/ web demo])</small>

;swf2js<smallclass="plainlinks" style="font-weight:normal;"> (web demos: [https://swf2js.com/free/index.html free], [https://swf2js.com/prod/index.html production])</small>:An open-core player that uses a dynamic recompiler. The source-available "Free" version supports limited features, such as AS1, AS2 and ZLIB compression. In contrast, whereas the payware "Production" version is better suited to newer Flash files using such features as AS3 and LZMA compressionfeatures. Built on more traditional JavaScript code, so it pretty much always performs worse than any of the WebAssembly-based optionsplayers, sometimes noticeably so.

:A relatively early HTML5 player, actively developed rather actively under Mozilla sponsorship between 2012 and 2016 but ultimately then abandoned before it could reach reaching a usable beta state. ==Peripherals=====ScaleForm GFx===Scaleform GFx is a discontinued game development middleware package, a vector graphics rendering engine used to display Adobe Flash-based user interfaces and HUDs for video games. In March 2011, Autodesk acquired Scaleform Corporation and Scaleform GFx became part of the Autodesk Gameware line of middleware. On July 12, 2018, Autodesk discontinued Scaleform GFx, and it is no longer available for purchase. Authors created user interfaces using Adobe Flash authoring tools, such as Adobe Animate (formerly Adobe Flash Professional); the resulting SWF files were used directly by the GFx libraries, providing similar functionality to the Adobe Flash Player but optimized for use within game engines. Scaleform GFx supported all major platforms, including game consoles, mobile and PC operating systems. Scaleform provides APIs for direct communication between Flash content and the game engine, and pre-built integrations for popular engines such as Unity, Unreal Engine, and CryENGINE. Scaleform GFx could also be licensed for use as a standalone Flash runtime system on mobile platforms, competing with Adobe AIR. ===Adobe AIR===Adobe AIR (also known as Adobe Integrated Runtime and codenamed Apollo) is a cross-platform runtime system currently developed by Harman International, in collaboration with Adobe Inc., for building desktop and mobile applications, programmed using Adobe Animate, ActionScript, and optionally Apache Flex. It was originally released in 2008. The runtime supports installable applications on Windows, macOS, and mobile operating systems, including Android, iOS, and BlackBerry Tablet OS. AIR is a runtime environment that allows Adobe Animate content and ActionScript 3.0 coders to construct applications and video games that run as a stand-alone executable and behave similarly to a native application on supported platforms. An HTML5 application used in a browser does not require installation, while AIR applications require installation from an installer file (Windows and macOS) or the appropriate App Store (iOS and Android). AIR applications have unrestricted access to local storage and file systems, while browser-based applications only have access to individual files selected by users.

* [[Flashpoint]https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash?tab=collection Archive.org-Software Library: Flash] - preservation effort Internet Archive's Flash Games Software Library is abundant with options for any level of computer gaming. With an in-site emulator ready to run thousands of games designed in commercial web frameworks (not just Flash)the Software Library, the Internet Archive can turn your computer into a mini arcade at the click of a button.