Adobe to Pull Flash Player Plugin by 2020
While it may not conjure up the same outpouring of nostalgia as Microsoft’s MS Paint, it’s finally time to say goodbye to Flash – or at least get ready to.
Adobe announced its plans to phase out the Flash Player plugin by 2020.
In the mid-90’s, Flash broke out as the most popular way to watch video and play games online. But with the advent of HTML5 and other open standards, today most website browsers have built-in capabilities that eliminate the need for the additional download of a plugin.
“Where we’ve seen a need to push content and interactivity forward, we’ve innovated to meet those needs. Where a format didn’t exist, we invented one,” said Adobe in a blog post. “Over time, we’ve seen helper apps evolve to become plugins, and more recently, have seen many of these plugin capabilities get incorporated into open web standards.”
The software company said they plan to stop updating and distributing Flash Player in a few years, giving content creators time to migrate their Flash content to one of the existing open standards format.
However, Adobe said it will “move more aggressively” to pull the Flash Player “where unlicensed and outdated versions of Flash Player are being distributed.”
In the meantime, Adobe will continue to work with partners including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, and support systems that host Flash by providing security updates, adding features and updating capabilities.
