The switch form Flash to HTML5 what does it mean?

Featured article by Jonas Riis Vestergaard, Independent Technology Author

If you were a kid growing up in the early 2000’s then you can probably remember playing browser-based games, developed on the Adobe flash platform. Some of the most popular mobile games we play today had their start in this way, games such as Bloons tower defense and Angry birds.

Back in 2016 Adobe announced that they were ending support for the program, and by the end of 2020 it will be completely disabled.

But let us take a look back at what made flash such a popular program to develop games on. It all started back in 1996 when it was developed in order to support web animations and multimedia, it was first some years after it was used to develop games with, but when young developers started using it for their games, then the program really took off. The advantage of flash was that you on any computer and any browser just could go to a website find your favorite game and start playing it. This also led to some Flash game portals, like Miniclip for example.

This was the first time back in the start of the 2000s that we had access to a wide variety of free games. The program was so popular that YouTube even used in its beginning.

Fast-forward to today and we are at the end of this era of free to play games on the internet. Flash has been faced out since 2016 and most browsers doesn’t even have it enabled now, such as chrome, safari and Firefox.

So, what is being used now to develop games and web browser now you might ask? Well it’s HTML5. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and it was in the start used for website development, HTML was very simple where it could only display basic text and images, where developers would need the help of Adobe Flash in order to add video graphics and more complex features to their websites.

But with the release of HTML5 this all changed. HTML5 is an open source which means everyone can use it without paying a licensing fee, which was the case with flash. And when you as the user want to play a game developed with HTML5 then you don’t have to download any extra extensions, as was the case with Adobe Flash.

We can also see this development in online gaming, where more and more people are starting to play on their mobile phones, be it subway surfer or angry birds or casino games. If you played casino games in the late 2000s then you most likely noticed that all of them of course was developed on Adobe Flash. Classic games such as “Dead or Alive” was released on the basis of the Flash platform. This has also created a change in the casino industry where more and more developers are frantically attempting to move their old games over to the new HTML5 format.

This has as previously mentioned created a shift in how we play, where before most of us would play at an online casino on a PC then have mobile gaming over the last couple of years risen to astonishing heights where more people actually play online casino games on their mobile phones than they do on the computer.