Adobe is sun-setting Flash, its once popular, empowering content platform that long ago became an anchor around the neck of the web.
Adobe's Flash, like Microsoft's Active-X, once filled a critical gap in web technologies. Once that gap no longer needed filling, though, Flash went from being progressive to regressive. Now, finally, Adobe is letting Flash wind down.
From Adobe, on the long, slow wind-down:
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. Specifically, we 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.
From Apple, who saw this most obvious of futures earlier than any of its competitors or critics, via its open source WebKit project:
Adobe has announced it will stop distributing and updating Flash Player at the end of 2020 and is encouraging web developers to migrate any existing Flash content to open standards. Apple is working with Adobe, industry partners, and developers to complete this transition.
Apple users have been experiencing the web without Flash for some time. iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch never supported Flash. For the Mac, the transition from Flash began in 2010 when Flash was no longer pre-installed. Today, if users install Flash, it remains off by default. Safari requires explicit approval on each website before running the Flash plugin.
That permission will also time out after a month if you don't continue visiting the site. Given how exploitable Flash has proven as an attack vector for malware over the last few years, and how unnecessary it's become for the modern web, I'd recommend simply leaving it uninstalled.
RIP Flash.
Reader comments
Adobe is finally killing Flash. Finally.
Good to see their working hard to make the transition by....2020?!
Wait...what?! Why does it take so long?
They have to give businesses that rely on Flash time to upgrade. It's stupid because no business should rely on Flash, but this is businesses we're talking about, the kind that still navigate the web on IE8, running Windows XP or earlier and getting infected by WannaCry
A decade late but welcome nonetheless. Now all that's left is for Apple to kill off that equally prehistoric requirement for iTunes when you want to sync music to your iDevice's native music app, and computing will become bearable again.
I haven't plugged any of my iStuff into iTunes ever. If you use a modern and decent music service, they have a cloud library which will sync automatically. When you're on WiFi, just d/l the stuff you want so that it's local.
⬆️ This, don't settle with the rubbish that is iTunes, there are much better alternatives
You did read that part where I mentioned "native music app" right?
I've tried dozens of third party music apps (and file managers with built-in media players) but the native music app is best when it comes to gapless playback via bluetooth to my car's stereo system*. With every other third-party player I've tried, I either get dropouts or skipping in between tracks. If it weren't for that requirement (or if someone made a competent player - recommendations welcome), I'd be like you and not launch iTunes ever.
*and no, I'm not going to change my car's stereo just for that reason. Firstly, it's a decent Mark Levinson system, and more importantly, I'd lose the steering wheel volume and nav controls with a third party unit.
This thing should have been taken out back behind the shed and shot a long time ago.
Definitely
My favorite part about the whole Flash support on mobile issue was how much Android bragged on how they provided access to the "whole" internet and iOS did not. Of course Flash support sucked on Android because it was a resource hog and Flash was designed to support mouse and keyboard input. Unless you re-coded a Flash app expecting pointer input to support touch it was basically useless for anything other than playing video. How long has it been since we've heard about Flash from Android?--exactly.
5 years ago to be exact. Android folks don't care about Flash. And never did. Maybe now the trailers site on apple.com will stop using ancient QT crap and go HTML5 so that Chrome and other browsers don't have load an antiquated plugin? Yeah. A lot of folks are multi-os and multi-app .. so lets get over the flash thing and get over the QT thing as well. If ones house isn't clean then ******** about another house is lame. heh.
Having Flash as an option on Android was really nice up until like 2011 or so. It just hasn't been a part of any site I've used frequently (for personal use, anyway) for at LEAST five years, though.
At this point, the only interaction I have with Flash at all is when using some of my company's ancient online training vendors which still use Flash for about half of their training modules, and I don't access those from a mobile device anyway.
Don't forget that the a**clown who championed Flash (this guy claimed HTML5 will throw the web back to the dark ages) is now an Apple VP overseeing the Apple Watch.
Now content providers will be forced to abandon it, and the sooner the better.
Side bonus for writers like you: no more explaining why Flash is bad and how to avoid it.
Shoot… I might not need Chrome at that point. I can't think of why I would use it after Flash is dead.
sunsetting isn't a hyphenated word.;)