Adobe will officially be ending their support for Adobe Flash in 2020, according to a blog post from the Adobe official blog.
If you don’t know, Adobe Flash is an old, outdated open standard that was around during the early days of the internet (I mean the 1990s and beyond, not just the 2000s). Most people have moved on from using Adobe Flash as their primary open standard to more recent ones like HTML5, WebAssembly and WebGL.
“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,” it said in the Adobe blog post (all of the links lead to other blog posts from those partners on the end of Adobe Flash).
Adobe has encouraging people to leave Adobe Flash behind since 2015, according to the Verge. They encouraged people to use other open standards like HTML5 then, so it’s no surprise that the company is finally ready to close its doors on one of the oldest parts of the internet.
Adobe still plans to support HTML5 and WebAssembly, even after they leave Adobe Flash behind.
“Adobe will also remain at the forefront of leading the development of new web standards and actively participate in their advancement. This includes continuing to contribute to the HTML5 standard and participating in the WebAssembly Community Group,” it said in the Adobe blog post. “And we’ll continue to provide best in class animation and video tools such as Animate CC, the premier web animation tool for developing HTML5 content, and Premiere Pro CC.”
Before this announcement, big Adobe partner Apple stopped allowing Adobe Flash on their iPhones, iPads and iPod touches in 2010, according to a news update on Apple’s official website. In the news update, former CEO of Apple Steve Jobs said that because Adobe is the only thing that has control over Adobe Flash, that websites were starting to run on HTML5, for security reasons, etc. Even though iPhones lacked Adobe Flash, users still had a variety of options that didn’t require the use of Adobe Flash.
“Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short,” said Jobs. “New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”
Yikes. Well, seven years after Apple made it’s declaration towards Adobe, Adobe seems to agree that Adobe Flash is done with. Apple also took away Adobe Flash from Mac in 2010, and if Mac users wanted to use Adobe Flash, they would have to agree to run it on every website they went on from Safari, according to the Apple blog update on Adobe Flash ending.
“Looking ahead, Adobe will continue to provide the best tools and services for designers and developers to create amazing content for the web,” it said in the Adobe blog post.
Although the internet has only been around for more than two decades, it continues to improve every single day with plenty of updates that modernize it. Adobe Flash is one of the dinosaurs of the internet that has been around for an incredibly long time, so saying goodbye to it isn’t as difficult because we have other open standards to use going forward.
