14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe has just announced that it would be retiring Flash Player at the end of 2020 in a historical decision that would impact a long number of products, including Microsoft’s own Windows operating system.
With Flash still widely adopted across the world, but with open standards growing up in usage at a fast pace, Adobe says that it just makes sense to retire Flash Player, with the company now encouraging content creators to make the switch to alternative solutions.
Though several products would be impacted, Adobe says that it’s working together with partners to make the demise of Flash Player as smooth as possible, including with Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Mozilla, and Google.
“But as open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the web,” Adobe explains.
“Over time, we’ve seen helper apps evolve to become plugins, and more recently, have seen many of these plugin capabilities get incorporated into open web standards. Today, most browser vendors are integrating capabilities once provided by plugins directly into browsers and deprecating plugins.”
Goodbye, Flash Player, you’ll not be missed
While many people saw this coming, especially because Flash Player has become one of the most vulnerable pieces of software integrated into today’s modern solutions, including browsers, Adobe’s decision is certainly surprising, especially because the full retirement will take place in just 3 years.
Adobe says it will continue to deliver security patches for browsers and operating systems until the end of 2020, but by that point, everyone should already complete the transition to alternative solutions.
“In addition, we plan to move more aggressively to EOL Flash in certain geographies where unlicensed and outdated versions of Flash Player are being distributed,” Adobe says.
Microsoft has already announced that it’s also pulling Flash from Windows and its browsers by the end of 2020, and similar measures will be taken by the other companies impacted by Adobe’s decision.