End of an era? Yeah. Adobe has confirmed that the Flash Player will officially be retired on December 31 this year, and the company will offer no improvements or security patches beyond this date.
It has been a long road getting here.
A long road.
The company originally announced its decision to pull Flash wall the way back in 2017. But even then, Adobe had penciled the whole thing to happen in late 2020. Well, late 2020 is on the horizon now, and we finally have a date.
And with that, Adobe has confirmed that it is working with partners to make the transition to newer standards like HTML5 as smooth as possible.
“As previously announced in July 2017, Adobe will stop distributing and updating Flash Player after December 31, 2020 (“EOL Date”). We made this announcement in collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – which issued complementary announcements with more technical detail on what the Flash Player EOL will mean for developers, enterprises, and consumers using their specific OS environments or browsers.”
So that’s how it ends.
Of course, this decision will impact millions of websites, sites and services that are built around or support the Flash technology. Many have already made the switch to newer web standards, but most will be left out.
So, what will change for Windows users after this date, when Flash is no longer supported?
The most vital consequence of this decision is the lack of security patches, which is important as the Flash Player has long been one of the apps with the biggest amount of security flaws.
Adobe will also remove Flash Player download pages and content will be blocked from running in the app. Sure, the application will be available for download from other sources, but the company recommends against doing so.
In addition to all this, Adobe will also fire security warnings to devices where Flash Player will be installed, asking users to uninstall the software.
End of an era, indeed.
