Adobe today announced it would be killing off Flash by the end of 2020, and it called on several major sites for help with the hit.
It’s not the first time we’ve talked about Flash’s impending doom — from Chrome killing Flash, to Mozilla killing Flash, to the death of Flash.
Reports of Flash’s death were greatly exaggerated, apparently, because it’s stuck around somehow.
But this time it looks like the end has come for real. Adobe says:
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.
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They are calling on Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Mozilla for help maintaining Flash integrity until its death in 2020. Facebook announced it will be migrating its Flash-based games to open web standards like HTML5. Apple’s Webkit team said the company’s customers might not even notice a difference, as Flash hasn’t come pre-installed on Macs since 2010, Safari asks permission before running it, and iOS devices never supported it at all.
Google, for its part, said this has been slowly coming on for some time:
Three years ago, 80 percent of desktop Chrome users visited a site with Flash each day. Today usage is only 17 percent and continues to decline. This trend reveals that sites are migrating to open web technologies, which are faster and more power-efficient than Flash. They’re also more secure, so you can be safer while shopping, banking, or reading sensitive documents.
Rest in peace Flash — finally.
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