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Among various tools and technologies used to designing websites, Adobe Flash has come a long way adopting and adhering to common web standards and technologies. Do you recall your memory of the websites you navigated through a decade ago and the websites you use for online shopping nowadays? What a difference! There are number of factors, which changed the look and feel of the web over time, and Adobe Flash (formally known as Macromedia Flash) has done a remarkable job in the field.

The primary challenge for Flash in the early years was its incompatibility with some of web/internet standards and tools. Flash needs propriety plug-in to be installed in your web browser before it can show the content. Many web browsers were not compatible with this or in other words, there were no plug-ins available for some of the web browsers due to various issues. This made Flash to be popular among a niche crowed. But when the popularity went up, more plug-ins were available for various browsers and some browsers were abandoned by users since they were incapable of showing flash content. I bet you can recall couple of names!

According to a survey, 98% of internet users of the US have the Flash plug-in installed in their web browser and 45% to 56% (depending on demographics) of them has the latest version. This explains how popular this technology is. Even though Flash started as a medium for delivering multimedia content such as sound, images, video and animation, later it developed in to a more sophisticated medium for user interaction. This was mainly due to ActionScript, a language which is used to program Flash. Users can interact with Flash created using ActionScript to input data and the content of the Flash will be varied run-time based on the inputs received. As you already know, it is an example of supporting dynamic content and it is the second generation of web, the successor of the static content era.

The next challenge for Flash is its adaptation for Web 2.0. Web 2.0 implementations are now slowly coming in to our sight and it is not for long that it would conquer everything in web. Flash proved its adoptability through years and I expect that to be the case for Web 2.0 as well. Let us wait and see what the surprises that Adobe has for us!