Flash is being killed by Adobe this year

Apr 28, 2020 19:49 GMT  ·  By

The Document Foundation is working not only on minor revisions for LibreOffice, which most often include tens of bug fixes, but also on a new major release that should go live at some point in the coming months.

Referred to as LibreOffice 7.0, this new major update will include lots of improvements, including several under-the-hood changes that make sense moving forward.

As one of the most popular productivity suites out there, LibreOffice also supports exporting content, such as presentations and drawings, to Adobe Flash. In other words, it’s one easy way to create Flash Player content that can be then used for a wide variety of purposes.

The problem with Flash is that Adobe itself plans to retire it later this year, so the entire world is leaving it behind.

And according to the official release notes of LibreOffice 7.0, The Document Foundation is doing the same thing, with the next major release of the productivity suite to drop this feature once and for all. In other words, beginning with this update, you will no longer be able to export content to Flash.

The Flash Player demise

The move isn’t surprising, as most tech companies have been working on removing Flash code from their applications, including companies like Google and Microsoft.

Adobe expects the demise of Flash Player to be complete by the end of the year.

“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 announced back in 2017.

“Several industries and businesses have been built around Flash technology – including gaming, education and video – and we remain committed to supporting Flash through 2020, as customers and partners put their migration plans into place.”

LibreOffice 7.0 is projected to launch in August according to the existing release schedule.

Via BornCity