Pierluigi Paganini
July 26, 2017
It’s official, Adobe will kill Flash by 2020, the company will stop providing support for the popular browser plugin.by the end of that year.
“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.” states the Adobe’s announcement.
Open standards like HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly have matured enough over the past years to replace all the features today implemented by Adobe Flash.
Starting from 2020, the company will no more provide support on major browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer and Edge.
“If the site continues to use Flash, and you give the site permission to run Flash, it will work through the end of 2020.” wrote Google. “We’re supportive of Adobe’s announcement today, and we look forward to working with everyone to make the web even better. “
“To provide guidance for site authors and users that continue to rely on Flash, Mozilla has updated its published roadmap for Flash in Firefox. Starting next month, users will choose which websites are able to run the Flash plugin.” states Firefox. “Flash will be disabled by default for most users in 2019, and only users running the Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) will be able to continue using Flash through the final end-of-life at the end of 2020. In order to preserve user security, once Flash is no longer supported by Adobe security patches, no version of Firefox will load the plugin.”
According to Google, Flash usage had gone down from 80% to 17%.
In a similar way, Microsoft also announced the end of support for its products.
“We will phase out Flash from Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer, culminating in the removal of Flash from Windows entirely by the end of 2020. This process began already for Microsoft Edge with Click-to-Run for Flash in the Windows 10 Creators Update.” states Microsoft.
Facebook also announced that it will shut off Flash games by the end of 2020.
Administrators of Websites that rely on Flash are being encouraged to start planning the migration to new technologies.
Under the cyber security perspective, the Adobe Flash end of life is a good news because it is one of the most exploited software in recent cyber attacks.
[adrotate banner=”9″]
(Security Affairs – (Adobe Flash end of Life, cyber security)
[adrotate banner=”13″]
