Adobe embraces the HTML5 future with Animate CC

Adobe is finally starting to acknowledge that Flash's days are numbered.

Flash has throughout the years been criticized as buggy and insecure, with its most famous critic being the late Steve Jobs. With the emergence of HTML5, the need for plug-ins like Adobe Flash ended and gave companies the ability to add rich features into browsers without having to install software beforehand.

Along with changing the name of Flash Professional CC, Adobe is working on major feature updates for the software, including improved drawing, illustration, and authoring support and integration with Adobe Stock and Creative Cloud Libraries. By the next year Adobe began making changes, including stopping support for Flash on mobile at the end of 2011, and subsequently updating its tools to make way for HTML5.

While that was once true, everyone is ready to move forward with a more open standard, and that standard just so happens to be HTML5. That said, many websites and apps still rely on Flash to power games and video. The company maintains that Flash has played a leading role in bringing new capabilities to the Web. Yet, "Today, open standards like HTML5 have matured and provide numerous capabilities that Flash ushered in", Adobe said in the post. Some of the blowback from future Flash vulnerabilities will be mitigated as Adobe can say, "hey look, we gave people HTML5 tools so they don't have to use Flash". So today we are announcing Animate CC, previously Flash Professional CC, which will be Adobe's premier web animation tool for developing HTML5 content while continuing to support the creation of Flash content. will be available in early 2016.