Adobe has announced it will stop developing and distributing Flash at the end of 2020 and is encouraging content creators to move their content to open formats such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly. The times, they are a changin’.
Earlier in the week, the world reacted to the news that MS Paint was being killed off by Microsoft. As it turns out, reports of its death were greatly exaggerated. But Adobe Flash is definitely living on borrowed time.
Ever since Steve Jobs published his open letter “Thoughts on Flash“, the writing has been on the wall for the veteran multimedia program. Since that letter, published in April 2010, mobile platforms have become increasingly popular and Flash has been subject to numerous security issues.
According to Adobe we’ll continue to see security updates and patches to ensure compatibility as supported operating systems are updated until the end of 2020. And that article has links to comments from a number of software partners about Adobe’s announcement.
Flash was incredibly important but its time has passed. The newer standards are, at least thus far, easier to secure and able to work on a wider variety of platforms. Now that we know Flash is about to go, we can hope content creators move quickly to migrate content to newer formats.
Comments
2 responses to “It’s Official: Adobe Is Killing Flash”
Well it’s not really “about to go” – it still has another 2.5 years left in it, which is more than enough time for anyone still using it to convert over.
With that header image, I read the headline in Homestar Runner’s voice.
Try it. It’s actually pretty funny.