Adobe took Flash under its wing and developed many more features in the years to come.įlash gave life to some of the internet’s most beloved websites, cartoons, games, and more. In 2005, Macromedia was acquired by Adobe Systems (the same company that turned down an offer to buy FutureSplash in 1995). In 2000, Flash 5 was released with ActionScript, a rudimentary scripting language that closely mimics JavaScript. Macromedia added more bells and whistles to Flash over time. It was even used to make entire websites that looked great for the time, were fast to load, and responsive to use. Flash enabled creators, marketers, and anyone with an eye for new media to create games, animations, banner adverts, interactive menus. They scale infinitely since they have no defined size, unlike raster graphics which have much larger file sizes and will pixellate when stretched. Vector graphics are essentially text-based instructions. RELATED: What's the Difference Between Pixels and Vectors? This was important at a time when many people were using dial-up internet with slow download speeds.

Since Flash used vector-based graphics, file sizes for the resulting animations were tiny. By the mid-2000s, Flash had taken off in a big way, spurred on by the popularity of browser games, animations, and interactive tools that relied on it.įlash was able to rise to prominence thanks to the simplicity of installing a small plugin that was compatible with most browsers. Macromedia rebranded the tool as Macromedia Flash 1.0 and released it alongside a counterpart browser plugin called Macromedia Flash Player.

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