The Photoshop giant, Adobe is giving up the development of its multimedia browser plugin – Flash. Yes, the company has announced it will discontinue Flash updates after 2020. No further updates following the mentioned date will mark the end of plugin support for many browsers, like Chrome, Internet Explorer and Edge, and Firefox.
Adobe confirms Flash plugin’s demise date
The Web has evolved over time but Flash failed to adapt to this new world. Moreover, the plugin has remained largely insecure to threat attacks due to both, its prevalence and multiple flaws lingering in the code.
Today, most browser vendors are integrating capabilities once provided by plugins directly into browsers and deprecating plugins. 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, mentioned Adobe Corporate Communications in a blog post yesterday.
A vast majority of video streaming sites like Netflix and YouTube have already ditched Flash in favor of HTML5 video since the latter is a much more efficient way to run videos and animations on a page compared with Flash. This becomes particularly important when you care about battery life.
All said, Adobe acknowledges that several businesses have been built around Flash technology – including gaming, education and video. As such, the company remains committed to supporting Flash through 2020 by issuing regular security patches, maintaining OS and browser compatibility and adding features and capabilities as needed.
Also, it will continue its efforts to provide best in class animation and video tools such as Animate CC, the premier web animation tool for developing HTML5 content, and Premiere Pro CC.
