Adobe announced its plans to deprecate Flash Player in July 2017. After almost three years, the company has now announced the exact date of discontinuation – December 31, 2020.
“By announcing our business decision in 2017, with three years’ advance notice, we believed that would allow sufficient time for developers, designers, businesses, and other parties to migrate existing Flash content as needed to new, open standards,” says Adobe in a blog post.
Adobe will stop updates and will remove Flash Player download pages from its website after December 31. In addition, the company will block Flash-based content in Adobe Flash Player.
Adobe Flash was originally created by a firm named FutureWave, which later got acquired by Macromedia. Adobe acquired Macromedia in the mid-2000s. There used to be a time when a vast majority of the internet relied on Adobe Flash for multimedia, despite security concerns. Fortunately, we have better alternatives such as HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly now.
Here’s what Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs had to say about Flash back in 2010. “Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces, and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.”
If you have Adobe Flash installed on your machine, you may uninstall it by following the instructions here, as we progress towards a secure web. Adobe says it will prompt users to uninstall Flash Player later this year.
