Adobe has decided the end is near for their trademark multimedia platform and they’ve set a forecast for its official demise. Yes, Flash is dead. Or it will be, at least.
The software giant announced that they will no longer be supporting Flash beginning in 2020. Companies like Apple have already beaten Adobe to the punch on ditching Flash and the declining popularity of the previously omnipresent ’90s-born Adobe creation gave the platform an aura of having its day numbered. In a release provided today, Adobe trumpeted their accomplishments with Flash while setting the table for its eventual retirement.
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.
Given this progress, and in collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – 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.
Untangling Flash from the browser experience may be a bit surreal for users of a certain age, although the level of mourning will likely be determined by how its substitutes do. Adobe’s been attempting to figure out what to do with Flash for a while and the decision that’s won out overall is putting it down.