The End of an Era
It’s been a long time coming since the release of the first iPhone and the iOS platform which never supported Flash. Well, Adobe is finally planning to shelf Flash once and for all. Many browsers have been blocking Flash over the past year, and now Adobe is planning to officially discontinue support by the end of 2020. “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,” explains an Adobe spokesperson.
A large number of websites still use Flash, and Adobe says it remains committed to supporting the technology until 2020 alongside partners like Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Microsoft says it plans to disable Flash by default in Edge and Internet Explorer in mid to late 2019, with a full removal from all supported versions of Windows by 2020. Google will continue phasing out Flash over the next few years, while Mozilla says Firefox users will be able to choose which websites are able to run Flash next month and allow Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) users to keep using Flash until the end of 2020.
2020 will mark an end of an era for Flash, which provided an amazing platform for developing highly interactive rich media websites. HTML5 standards have been implemented across all modern web browsers, and the need for Flash just isn’t there anymore. An end to Flash will bring with it obvious improvements in security and just pure battery life on laptops and other mobile devices that still support the web technology.
If you would like to discuss moving your website away from Flash, give us a call.