14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe’s Flash is slowly but surely going dark ahead of the 2020 retirement date that the parent company has already announced.
The latest tech giant to leave Flash behind for one of its products is none other than Google, who recently confirmed that Google Search would stop supporting Adobe’s platform once and for all by the end of the year.
A specific date isn’t available, but Google says it’ll happen “later this year,” with Flash to be then ignored on pages where it exists.
This is a decision that doesn’t come as a big surprise, and it of course won’t impact users in any way.
“Google Search will stop supporting Flash later this year. In Web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content. Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files. Most users and websites won't see any impact from this change,” Dong-Hwi Lee, engineering manager, Google, explained in a blog post.
The end of Flash
Adobe announced is decision to retire Flash back in July 2017, and since then, several large companies, including here Google and Microsoft, gradually stepped away from it as well. Flash is already disabled by default in the majority of browsers, and full support should be removed by the end of next year.
Adobe hasn’t provided a specific target when it plans to discontinue Flash, but for now, we do know the company intends to retire this product in late 2020.
“In collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, 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,” Adobe said in its original announcement.