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It’s no secret that Adobe’s Flash Player is on its way out. The legacy multimedia platform has been heavily responsible for shaping the web, mobile platforms and desktops as we know them. The deprecation of Flash has been in the works for quite some time with Google leading the charge by reducing Chrome’s dependency on the player.
As the web moves to more modern protocols and lighter packaging for media, Google had plans to remove Flash all but completely from Chrome and Chrome OS by the earlier parts of this year. That process has been extended a bit due to reasons I probably couldn’t begin to fathom. Seamlessly moving users from a two-decade old platform to the newer HTML5 experience is surely a massive undertaking.
Despite the stay of execution for Flash, today Adobe along with Google have officially revealed when the multimedia software will see its end. According to The Keyword, Google will completely remove Flash from the Chrome browser towards the end of 2020. The news stems from a blog post on Adobe’s website confirming that they would, indeed, be ending update and distribution of the Flash Player in 2020.
From Adobe:
…open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the web.
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.
There really isn’t much left to say about this subject. We all knew it was coming. Even Adobe admits the time for Flash has passed. Personally, I will be glad to stop receiving “restart to update Flash Player” updates on my Chromebooks.
As I stated in previous articles, by the time we see Flash shelved the user experience will be all but unaffected. For the minute percentage of sites that don’t migrate to new platforms, they probably need to go the way of Flash anyway.
