Adobe Flash Player was one of the most popular computer programs for viewing multimedia content, graphics-rich applications, animations, games, streaming audio and video, and other internet applications. Initially developed by FutureWave in 1996 but was later distributed and managed by Adobe when they acquired Macromedia in 2005.
3 Best Adobe Flash Player Alternatives
Even though Adobe Flash Player was quite popular, it had some performance and security flaws, and that’s why in December 2020, Adobe decided to discontinue the product.
1 3 Best Adobe Flash Player Alternatives1.1 1. Lightspark1.2 2. Ruffle1.3 3. FlashFox Browser2 Final Words
The good thing is that the Adobe Flash Player wasn’t the only software of its kind. There are plenty of Flash Player replacements available on the internet that you can use. But the question remains the same – which is the best Adobe Flash Player replacement? To help you with that, here we have a list of the three best Adobe Flash Player alternatives.
1. Lightspark
The very first on our list, we have Lightspark. It is an open-source SWF player, which is available entirely for free. This software supports almost all mainstream browsers and is compatible with Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows operating systems.
The entire code of this SWF player is written in C/C++ language, and the open-source code of all the releases is available on the GitHub repository. If you are a developer yourself, you can get the code and all other essential files from GitHub and modify them for your personal use. While Lightspark supports most of the programs based on ActionScript 3.0, there is also a plugin specially designed for Mozilla Firefox. It supports OpenGL rendering and LLVM ActionScript executions. This plugin can render and play almost every single format of Adobe Flash content. So, whether you want to render any game, YouTube video, or H.264 flash video, Lightspark would be a good choice for you.
2. Ruffle
Next, we have Ruffle on our list. It is, again, an open-source SWF player that came into existence in 2016. This Adobe Flash Player alternative is written in the Rust programming language. The developer, Mike Welsh, developed this tool openly on GitHub so that anybody with programming knowledge can copy the code and modify it for better performance.
Mike Welsh decided to develop this software when Adobe officially announced that they would discontinue the Adobe Flash Player in January 2021. Adobe did it to promote the use of HTML 5. However, the developers saw it as an opportunity, and they also got sponsorship and support from Newgrounds and other entertainment and gaming companies. Ruffle is available both as a desktop client and plugin-based web client. If you are a developer, you can implement Ruffle on your website using JavaScript, and for end-users, the browser-based extension will be a perfect choice. Ruffle has been adopted as a Flash Player alternative by many leading organizations such as Internet Archive, Coolmath Games, Armor Games, Newgrounds, and more. So overall, if you are looking for a Flash Player replacement, this will be a perfect choice.
3. FlashFox Browser
Lastly, we have FlashFox Browser on our list. If you are an Android user looking for Adobe Flash Player alternatives, there are a few options for you. However, the development firm, Mobius Networks, decided to fill the gap with this FlashFox browser.
FlashFox Browser is considered the fastest Adobe Flash Player-enabled browser for Android smartphones and is quite popular amongst Android users. The earlier released version of the FlashFox Browser had some major crashing issues, but the developers have managed to fix them in recently released versions. Therefore, some older reviews on Google Play Store are not that good. But overall, it has over 5 million downloads from the Google Play Store. So, even though the browser has some bad reviews, people are using it. FlashFox Browser is amongst the few web browsers for Android that allow you to run Flash Player-based content on your smartphone. You can use this browser to play old Flash Player-based games, web pages, animations, and more very quickly.
Final Words
There you have it – a list of the three best Adobe Flash Player alternatives. Even though Adobe Flash Player was one of the most popular and used SWF players out there, it has been plagued with security concerns, and therefore, it struggled to keep up with the internet technologies. Even Steve Jobs criticized the software and wholly denied using it on Apple products. On the other hand, HTML 5 was getting popular at that time, and it used to provide similar functions as Adobe Flash Player but didn’t require installing any plugin or software. This was one of the reasons the popularity of Flash Player started to fade. Even within a year, the rate of users visiting Flash sites went down to 17% from 80%. Many companies such as Facebook, YouTube, and others decided to stop using Flash Player completely. These were some of the reasons Adobe announced that it would discontinue the Flash Player altogether. But still, many websites that were designed before 2017 use Flash. When the Flash Player decided to discontinue its services, they moved to similar alternatives such as Ruffle. Therefore, if you want to access such websites, you can use the other options mentioned in this list. With that said, here I am wrapping up this article. If you have any questions, please shoot them in the comment section below. Our team will try to respond to all your comments ASAP.
