14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe has already announced that it plans to completely retire Flash Player in December, and the entire industry is preparing for this big moment.
Adobe’s decision was officially shared in 2017, so browser makers out there had more than three years to pave the way for a world without Flash. And now Mozilla is killing off support for Adobe’s software too, first in the testing builds of Firefox and then in the stable branch.
Firefox 85 will be the first major version of Mozilla’s browser that will ship without Flash Player support, and this will happen on January 26. In other words, Firefox 84 will be the final update that would still boast Flash Player, after which the code would just be removed once and for all.
“Firefox version 84 will be the final version to support Flash. On January 26, 2021 when we release Firefox version 85, it will ship without Flash support, improving our performance and security. For our users on Nightly and Beta release channels, Flash support will end on November 17, 2020 and December 14, 2020 respectively. There will be no setting to re-enable Flash support,” Mozilla explained today, via TechDows.
The decision obviously makes sense, especially because Firefox is currently one of the world’s leading browsers. Third-party market share statistics indicate Firefox is right now the third most popular browser on the desktop after Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.
Adobe will officially remove all download links and resources related to Flash Player next month, and the company explains that by this point, the entire world should migrate to one of the many alternatives out there.
“Open standards such as HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly have continually matured over the years and serve as viable alternatives for Flash content. Also, the major browser vendors are integrating these open standards into their browsers and deprecating most other plug-ins (like Adobe Flash Player).By announcing our business decision in 2017, with three years’ advance notice, we believed that would allow sufficient time for developers, designers, businesses, and other parties to migrate existing Flash content as needed to new, open standards,” Adobe explains.
Of course, you’re not recommended to continue running Flash even if it’s already installed on the device, and the software shouldn’t be downloaded from other sites because it’s no longer supported by Adobe. This is the reason the Adobe Flash plugin for Firefox would stop loading Flash content after January 12, so the only way to go after December would be to give up on Flash Player completely.
“These versions of Flash Player are not authorized by Adobe. Customers should not use unauthorized versions of Flash Player. Unauthorized downloads are a common source of malware and viruses. Adobe has no responsibility for unauthorized versions of Flash Player and customers’ use of such versions is entirely at their own risk,” the company warned.
All the other browsers out there would also give up on Flash Player by the end of the year, including here Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. This is something that has happened gradually to make the transition to alternative solutions as smooth as possible.
If Flash Player is currently installed on your computer, you should remove it next month because Adobe would no longer release any new security updates going forward. And as usual, running unsupported software increases the likelihood of exploits and potential attacks, and given Flash Player has long been one of the applications most exposed to hackers, it’s pretty clear that protecting your device should be a top priority after December.