Adobe has finally announced the end of life for Flash on the Internet. In a blog post made yesterday, the company announced that it will be pulling support from 2020 onwards. “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,” says the post. The move isn’t particularly surprising and can be seen as something that was inevitable.
Though the Flash Player will technically be supported till 2020, combined with denial from browsers, this is the effective death of Flash, finally. Google had already disabled Flash on Chrome by default, although it allows users to turn it back on manually. Microsoft had recently said it would disable Flash from Edge and Internet Explorer by 2019, while Apple already follows an “opt-in” structure for using Flash on Safari.
Adobe says it will continue working towards development of other platforms, including HTML5. Businesses that have centered their products around Flash have three years to migrate to one of the newer open standards now. In addition, “We plan to move more aggressively to EOL Flash in certain geographies where unlicensed and outdated versions of Flash Player are being distributed,” the company wrote.