Adobe is finally planning to kill off Flash media player once and for all. 2020 will mark an end of an era for Flash. The news doesn’t come as a surprise to most as the internet has already started shrinking Flash’s reach in favor of HTML5 and other open standards like WebGL and web assembly.
Various web browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Safari have all been blocking Flash over the past year, but Adobe is now planning to remove support for it. Adobe has said that the company will stop updating and distributing Flash at 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,” the company said in a blog post.
A number of gaming, education, and video sites still use Flash, and Adobe says it remains committed to supporting the technology until 2020 by taking help of its partners including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Also, they would be motivating developers to switch to open web standards as soon as possible.
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 ESR (Extended Support Release) users to keep using Flash until the end of 2020. 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 the end of 2020.
HTML5 standards have been implemented across all modern web browsers, and the need for Flash just isn’t there anymore. Today only 17% (this number was 80% around three years ago) desktop Chrome users visit Flash-based websites. And an end to Flash will likely result in more secure experiences, fewer browser crashes and longer battery life.
