Adobe Flash was once a must download in order to see certain content on your browser like watching video on YouTube and it is still prevalent in certain web content like ads. Thanks to the adoption of smartphones and Apple’s decision to move away from the standard way back has had an impact on its use and now we finally see its death.
Today, Adobe has decided to announce that they are planning to kill of Flash in the future in collaboration with major tech companies thanks to the advancement of open standards like HTML5, WebGL and Web Assembly.
“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,” they said in the blogpost. “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 open formats.”
There is still a lot of Flash content around the web and Adobe will continue to support the standard on major OSs and browsers until its eventual demise. This news is certainly more than welcome from the company which enjoyed a period when the standard was a must download plugin to run a lot of content on the web.
However thanks to the “courageous” move by Apple to move away from Flash as explained by Steve Jobs and the wide adoption of better standards like HTML5, it has finally led Adobe to lay to rest a standard that was plagued with security issues and hogging system resources. We also saw the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitch move away from Flash over time.
Interesting enough, Adobe says that they will be “contributing to the HTML5 standard and WebAssembly Community Group” and provide animation tools like Animate CC which allows people to develop HTML5 content.
