RIP SWF: Flash is dead

It all started in September 2006. xat’s chat service boosted the brand and reoriented its path to the future. But it is what they say, “nothing good lasts forever”.
So long Flash, and thanks for all the bugs.

First things first

Did you know that xat didn’t wait to test one power at a time?

The first four powers were all tested altogether – to impress users, xat allowed users to pay and be at the top of the users’ list (topman power), to change your subscriber star from yellow to black (subhide power), to ban longer (mod8 power), and to zoom into pictures (zoom power). With that, it was just the beginning.

SWF (Shock Wave File)

.SWF is the printable format for Flash files, and thanks to its compatibility with most of the browsers from 2006 it has helped xat to be nearly everywhere, from blogs, websites, forums, MySpace, Orkut, and Facebook.

You can ask anybody who’s been using xat since 2006, “how did you find xat”? Their answer is probably going to be “on a site” or “on a blog”.

There’s no senior xat user who doesn’t remember the nostalgic chat sound that would play when new users joined or new messages were sent. Plop Plop.

Dead sentence

All good things must come to an end. Flash was developed by Macromedia and later was acquired by Adobe Inc. in 2005 due to its popular success and massive usage on the entire web. However, Adobe Inc. has announced that they will no longer update Flash after 2020.

Its real death is planned to occur before the year 2020 ends. To avoid security inconveniences and browsers incompatibilities, xat has decided to stop fixing Flash bugs, by moving its service to the new popular language of the web: HTML5.

HTML5

With Flash, animations started to be an essential part of the “xat experience”, which is not going to change on the HTML5 platform.

As far as we know, xat is already working to implement all the cool stuff you could see in Flash, and even better, you are about to see stuff that would never work as fast as it does on HTML. To put it simply, HTML runs much more smoothly on computers than Flash. The secret? It uses less RAM (memory).

“Old but gold”

The shark kiss and its loud scream. The April Fool prank that would make your entire chat screen fall to the bottom of the page. The giant annoying smilies that would appear all over the screen, barely letting you click. It is nostalgic to think that all of this happened almost ten years ago, and here we are, still, doing a riot for the “groupPC” power. Some things never change.

“A picture is worth a thousand words”, revive the memories: