14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe has confirmed that Flash Player would be officially retired on December 31, so no other security patches and improvements would be released beyond this date.
The company originally announced its decision to pull Flash in 2017, but at that point, it only said the whole thing would happen in “late 2020.”
Now we finally have a date, and Adobe says it’s working with partners to make the transition to new standards, such as HTML5, as smooth as possible for everyone.
“As previously announced in July 2017, Adobe will stop distributing and updating Flash Player after December 31, 2020 (“EOL Date”). We made this announcement in collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – which issued complementary announcements with more technical detail on what the Flash Player EOL will mean for developers, enterprises, and consumers using their specific OS environments or browsers,” Adobe says.
The world without Flash Player
So what’s changing once Flash is no longer supported?
The most important consequence is the lack of security patches, and given Flash Player has long been one of the apps with the biggest number of found security flaws, it’s pretty clear this is quite a concern.
Then, Adobe will remove Flash Player download pages and content will be blocked from running in the app. If you’re trying to download Flash Player from other sources, Adobe says these aren’t authorized links and the company recommends against doing it.
Security warnings will be issued on devices where Flash Player is installed to recommend users to uninstall the software.
“Adobe will not issue Flash Player updates or security patches after the EOL Date. We recommend that all users uninstall Flash Player before the EOL date. Users will be prompted by Adobe to uninstall Flash Player on their machines later this year and Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date,” the company says.