If you’re one of the many, many people out there who despise Adobe Flash for its reputation of being a crashy wasteland brimming with bugs and vulnerabilities, we’ve got great news for you: Adobe is finally killing it off.
The bad news, however, is that it won’t be sun-setting the plugin until 2020.
Moving on
Adobe notes in an announcement that while Flash served its purpose, open standards like HTML5 and WebGL provide capabilities that plugins used to, and have become increasingly popular for content on the web.
Companies like Google have also taken things into their own hands by disabling the plugin by default and replacing it with HTML5.
“Given this progress, and in collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash,” the company says.
Adobe will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020, and “encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.”
A familiar tale
It’s not the first time Adobe has advised folks to use something other than Flash: Back in 2015, the company said it would be encouraging content creators to “build with new web standards” like HTML5, instead of Flash.
Flash, though once a great tool for creating web games and animations, has been less and less popular over the last 10 years: Flash pages and players load slowly and drain laptop batteries, and it isn’t widely supported on smartphones. It’s also been subject to a slew of security issues, making it a risky prospect for users browsing the web.
For you Flash lovers, you’ve got a few years to make your plans: Adobe says it will “remain committed to supporting Flash through 2020, as customers and partners put their migration plans into place.”
We’ll just leave you with this commentary from a truly peerless source:
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist
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