Dec 31, 2020: Adobe Flash Death Date Announced By Adobe

In an announcement made on Tuesday, Adobe has said that the company will stop updating and distributing Flash at the end of 2020, maybe on 31 Dec 2020.

The news doesn’t come as a surprise to most as the internet has already started shrinking Flash’s reach in favor of HTML5 and other open standards like WebGL and WebAssembly.

Various web browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, don’t run Flash-based content automatically, although, they still support the multimedia software. Google notes that today only 17% desktop Chrome users visit Flash-based websites; this number was 80% around three years ago.

Many foresaw Flash’s ill fate years ago. This includes the likes of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who in 2010, dedicated an entire open letter to Adobe Flash, detailing why Apple stopped supporting the same on iPhones and iPads running iOS.

Moreover, people have criticized Flash over its security vulnerabilities, browser crashes, and poor battery life of the machines. Ultimately, it led to the fall of the software that had made a great contribution in transforming the internet we see today.

It’s hard to say, but if Flash wasn’t there, popular websites like YouTube, which now loves HTML5, might have had a different fate. Although, I am not saying it wouldn’t have been that successful as it is today. So is the case of an uncountable number of websites featuring Fash-based games, videos, online radio apps, and other things.

Adobe will support Flash till 2020 by taking help of its partners including Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Also, they would be motivating developers to switch to open web standards as soon as possible.

Facebook said in their statement that there are still lots of Flash games on the social network which require migration. Mozilla has also detailed their road map for transitioning from Flash.

Microsoft said that Flash would eventually phase out from Edge and IE, “culminating in the removal of Flash from Windows entirely by the end of 2020.”

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