Adobe Flash Living out Its Last Days, to Be Discontinued in 2020

Adobe Flash to be discontinued in 2020.

Flash was initially released in November 1996 and acquired by Adobe in 2005.

(Photo: Rhythum Seth/The Quint)

Remember the times when you couldn’t watch a video or play a game on your computer just because you didn’t have your Adobe Flash updated. Well, that much- dreaded “Flash” is finally being put to an end.

Adobe has announced that all updates to the media tool used to power most of the video content found online will be discontinued by the end of 2020. Multiple platforms like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Mozilla said they will ramp down the support for flash in the next three years.

Why Adobe Flash Must Die?

In 2010, Apple CEO Steve Jobs discontinued support for Flash from iPhones criticising its reliability, security and performance and post that even Android followed suit in 2012 after halting support for the media tool. Since then, technologies like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have emerged to be more secure and faster for web-multimedia. Even Adobe invested in HTML5 in 2010 and strongly pushed the technology in late 2015.

As Flash is a widely-distributed and heavily-used technology. It’s highly vulnerable to malware and ransomeware attacks. It acts like a magnet for many hackers and takes a heavy toll on your battery.

Due to many vulnerabilities in Flash, Google has automatically blocked Flash ads from running since September 2015 and Firefox also began blocking some Flash elements. Although, Adobe has been constantly working on Flash security, still it doesn’t seem to be enough.

Gone in a ‘Flash’?

Over the years there has been a considerable drop in Flash usage. According to Google, in 2014, Flash was used each day by 80% of desktop users and today that number has fallen to 17% and continues to drop. This trend reveals that most websites are migrating to open web technologies, which are faster and more power-efficient.

Undeniably, technology is evolving and we all have to say goodbye to obsolete and older ways. The end of Flash was a long time coming and this will definitely make the user experience for millions of desktop and mobile phone users much better.

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