“The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 250,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.” – Steve Jobs
When Steve Jobs wrote his open letter to Adobe about Flash in 2010, that’s when the death spiral for Flash began.
In 2020, Adobe will finally kill Flash once and for all. All the major browsers including Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Safari have been blocking Flash over the past year and now Adobe is putting the final nail in the coffin by planning to remove support for it by the end of 2020.
“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,” explains an Adobe spokesperson.
Microsoft had already announced plans to disable Flash by default in Explorer and Edge by late 2019. Google is also phasing out Flash as well as Mozilla who will support it until 2020 while Safari currently requires user approval for use of Flash for some websites.
The death of Flash has been a long time coming. With the evolution of HTML 5 across websites as well as the growth of app stores, it was only a matter of time before Flash would meet its demise. With the death of Flash, users should be seeing improvements to battery life and security on their laptops and mobile devices.
RIP Flash. And good riddance.
