Adobe to Kill Flash… In 2020
In “Flash & the Future of Interactive Content,” Adobe has announced that it will kill Flash in 2020, nearly a decade after Steve Jobs wrote his “Thoughts on Flash” letter that outlined why Apple wouldn’t allow Flash to run in iOS. Specifically, Adobe will stop updating and distributing Flash Player at the end of 2020. That delay will give Flash-reliant businesses like CNN and industries like online gaming several years to migrate to new technologies.
Adobe explained its decision, saying:
As open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the Web. Over time, we’ve seen helper apps evolve to become plugins, and more recently, have seen many of these plugin capabilities get incorporated into open web standards. Today, most browser vendors are integrating capabilities once provided by plugins directly into browsers and deprecating plugins.
Unsurprisingly, Adobe made no mention of Flash’s drawbacks, such as security flaws and excessive power usage.
Adobe is partnering with Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla to help move existing Flash content to open standards like the aforementioned HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly.
Google has published Flash usage trends that show that only 17 percent of Google Chrome users encounter at least one page containing Flash content per day, down from 80 percent in 2014. It also calls out the fact that Flash is most heavily used on Facebook, which undoubtedly accounts for Facebook’s inclusion in the list of partners above, the rest of which are browser makers.
FLASH!
A-ah! Saviour of the universe
Flash, a-ah, he'll save everyone of us
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Flash, a-ah, he's a miracle
Flash, a-ah, king of the impossible.
Now I wonder how Hulu, ABC, WB and all the other media sites will stream their video...
Those vendors all came up with native solutions for iOS and Android. If they don't like cross-compiling to open solutions of HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly, they can make a proprietary solution. That would be stupid, but you never know.
Adobe has already been telling people to ditch Flash for years. There is still utter crap that's using Flash -- like large text headers on a redcross.org webpage. Google or someone should help sites find that eminently-replacable dreck.
That version of Flash was dreadful. That Queen song was the best thing in the movie. :)