We're in the last few months of 2018, and Adobe Flash's expiration date feels just within reach. That's not just wishful thinking, either — Adobe has stated it will officially end support for the ailing web plugin in 2020.

Flash is dead. Very dead. It lingers, however, mainly in the form of web games. Right now (at least in Chrome) you can give your favourite Flash game sites permission to run the plugin. That will change next month with Chrome 69, when constant "explicit permission" will be required.

Is it me, or are we seeing a lot more disclosures for big, scary vulnerabilities that affect your system's core components? Just a week or so ago, Microsoft and Google announced more issues - Rogue System Register Read and Speculative Store Bypass - which are fancy-sounding variants of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities that have dominated the tech news cycles this year.

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'.

Adobe's venerable Flash extension is, slowly but surely, going the way of the dodo. HTML5 is quickly replacing it in every corner of the Web with faster, quicker-loading and more lightweight tools that are responsive across desktop and mobile devices. But there's an argument for preserving Flash on the 'net.

After years of neglecting to do so, Adobe has now released Flash Player 24 for GNU/Linux. Now Windows, Mac and Linux are being offered the same version of Flash Player for the first time in ages. But considering Flash is already dying a slow and painful death, this might be too little too late.

The slow death of Adobe Flash marches on. Google has announced it will be blocking non-essential Flash content that runs in the background of webpages in September. Mozilla has already started doing this with its Firefox browser this month. Here's what you need to know.

I almost feel sorry for Flash. Kicked to the curb by Chrome and then Firefox, it won't be long before Microsoft turns the screws. Not that you have to wait for Redmond to get its act together -- you can turn it off right now and get a nice performance boost.

There was a time when browsers needed a little help to deliver decent multimedia content, but we're fast leaving those days behind. For proof, look no further to Google and now Mozilla's decision to cut the ancient Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI), the core API that allows plugins such as Flash and Silverlight to operate.

With the steady adoption of newer web technologies by browser vendors, Adobe Flash is inching ever closer to its electronic demise. Come 1 September, Google will be giving it a little push, when Chrome will start pausing Flash-based advertisements by default.

We already know that enabling Flash in the browser can impact your computer's performance and, along with other factors, slow browsing to a crawl. PCWorld did some tests to find out just how much of a difference running Flash makes.

Flash is an obvious solution for high-speed storage, but what proportion of network storage is typically devoted to it? The answer might be less than you think.

In another example of how good Steve Jobs was in picking technology losers and winners, in 2010 he listed all of the reasons why the world needed to move on from using Flash. At the time, Jobs was explaining why the iPhone and iPad would not support Flash but it is clear that if he could, he would have banned it from the desktop.

Android: If you still need Flash support on your phone, Now Browser is a speedy web browser for Android that offers it. It features a clean design that's at home in KitKat and gesture support. It's not as feature-packed as other browsers, but it's fast, lightweight and gets the job done.

Android/iOS: Flash on your mobile phone isn't nearly as necessary as it once was. But if you find yourself wishing you had it now and again, Puffin is a web browser that not only brings you Flash, but also an incredibly speedy browser experience overall.

Adobe's Flash plug-in has grown more robust over time, but it's still one of the major causes of instability in Firefox. You could always avoid sites containing Flash content, but that's not exactly practical. Instead, you can try and minimise where things can go wrong by tweaking your browser's settings and performing maintenance on your system.

Flash -- you either love it, or want to see it burning eternally in the fires of Hell. Mozilla's Shumway project, an attempt to create a replacement Flash plug-in that uses HTML5, might ever so slightly placate those barracking for the latter. Previously Shumway has only been available as a separate extension, but it recently made its way into Firefox's nightly builds, hinting at the prospect of mainline inclusion somewhere down the line.

Hey Lifehacker, Every time I'm playing a Flash video in chrome, it seems to cause lag in my other applications. I have a pretty powerful computer so it can handle multitasking, IE doesn't cause this problem and it only started happening a couple of months ago. Any thoughts? Thanks, Rolling Chrome

It's fortunate that modern browsers allow you to enable a "click to play" feature for media plug-ins such as Flash. Being a serial tab-opener, I have this feature active so audio from an auto-playing ad doesn't scary the heck out of me, but I could make do simply knowing which tab is producing the noise and acting from there.