Adobe has now officially renamed its Flash Professional to Adobe Animate CC. The renaming signifies a pivotal shift from Flash to HTML5, as the company says more than a quarter of all content created in Flash Professional uses HTML5. Along with Flash support, the renamed app will also offer support for other video and animation formats which include 4K, HTML5 canvas, and WebGL output.
“The use of open web standards and HTML5 has become the dominant standard on the web. Over the past few years, the Flash Professional CC product team has embraced this movement by rewriting the tool from the ground up, adding native support for HTML5 Canvas and WebGL as well as output to any format (such as SVG) with an extensible architecture. In order to more clearly reflect its role as the premier animation tool for the open web and beyond, we updated the name,” said Adobe in a blog post as the reason behind the name change.
Animate CC is not whole lot different from Flash Professional though it does get a slew of new features such as support for vector-based art, better audio syncing, support for more video formats along with better integration with other apps on Creative Cloud.
Flash undeniably enjoyed a lot of success though it was often considered as one of the casualties of the cyberspace. During its heyday, Flash was the only option available with designers to create animated content hence there was an increased reliance on the app.
There are still a plethora of sites and apps that rely on Flash, including most of the popular games on Facebook.
However, Flash has been subjected to heavy criticism by many including Steve Jobs. He ditched the app completely due to security and performance concerns after which YouTube and Twitch also followed suite. Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamon tweeted back in July that it’s time for Adobe to end Flash completely.
While recently, even Google and Mozilla decided to stop providing support for the plugin on their respective browsers after a critical flaw was revealed in patched Flash versions allowing hackers to take complete control over a user’s computer.
The move has been a long time coming given how Flash has been under constant scrutiny of web security experts and how it slows down the performance of webpages.
