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InfoQ Homepage News Adobe Will No Longer Support Flash after 2020

Adobe Will No Longer Support Flash after 2020

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Adobe has announced the termination of Flash by the end of 2020. Browser vendors have published timelines outlining the steps to phase out the technology in their respective browsers.

Adobe has finally decided to put an end to Flash, suggesting content developers to use instead HTML5 instead:

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 [HTML5, WebGL, etc. – Editor].

They will continue to issue "regular security patches, maintaining OS and browser compatibility and adding features and capabilities as needed" on Windows, Mac OS and Linux until the end of 2020. 

On the heels of Adobe’s announcement, all major browser vendors - Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla - announced plans to gradually remove Flash support from their desktop browsers, and some indicated alternative tools for developing multimedia content using standardized web technologies. Facebook does not have a browser of their own but they are by far the largest website with Flash content running in Chrome with 17.65% of the market. They too announced their support for developers to move games from Flash to HTML5, scheduling a number of free webinars to provide more detailed support how it can be done. Microsoft will remove Flash support completely from Windows not just Edge and IE by the end of 2020. Google indicated a number of resources to migrate from Flash: OpenWebGames.com and WebAssembly for games, Mozilla’s Flash to HTML5 migration guide for media, and HTML5 for advertising.

Flash was once almost omnipresent on the web but now it is used only by 6.3% client-side programming languages for websites, according to W3Techs. The downward trend was first signaled by Apple when they decided not to include Flash on their first phone 10 years ago, citing security, performance and battery consumption issues. Google did the same with Android later.

Adobe still remains involved in multimedia creation tools including their expertise in the area in Animate CC and Premiere Pro CC, but they are promoting HTML5.

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