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Adobe Retires Flash

After 24 years, Adobe Flash Player — the ubiquitous utility that fueled the Internet's transfor-
mation from text-only to a multimedia bonanza — is heading into retirement.

Adobe has issued its last Flash Player update and told users that the app would stop running con-
tent starting 12th January 2021.

Adobe's good-bye marks the end of 24 years for Flash Player, the utility that has fueled the Inter-
net's transformation from text-only to a multimedia bonanza.

It was back in 2017, Adobe announced it would retire Flash from support and halt distribution of
the application by the end of 2020. Adobe said that ending Flash was triggered by the evolution
and maturation of open standards — like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly — that "provide
many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered" and thus were "a viable alter-
native for content on the web."

What Adobe didn't mention was the security disaster Flash had become earlier in the century, the
endless rounds of patching security vulnerabilities, often the worst "zero-day" kind, which had
prompted so many content makers, former software partners and users to stiff-arm the player.

The big browser makers — Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla — piggybacked on Adobe's Ju-
ly 2017 announcement with their own roadmaps for the end of Player. Because the vast bulk of
Flash content was created for websites and run in web browsers, those four developers' plans car-
ried enormous weight

Here are how those browser makers will phase out Flash — if they haven't already done so — late
this year and early next.

Google Chrome

"Flash Player will be marked as out of date and will be blocked from loading" in Chrome come
January, Google said in the Chromium roadmap.

The Chromium project, the Google-led effort that produces the technologies foundational to not
only Chrome, but Microsoft's Edge as well, will also completely remove Flash support in January
with the launch of Chrome 88, now set to debut Jan. 19. "It will no longer be possible to enable
Flash Player with Enterprise policy in Chrome 88+," Google said.

Edge and Internet Explorer

Because Microsoft's Edge now relies on Chromium and Internet Explorer (IE) is maintained only
as a legacy last resort for businesses, the Redmond, Wash. developer's path toward Flash finality is
complicated.

But rather than spell out a set of steps it will take, Microsoft instead intends to go to the root of the
problem and purge Flash from Windows. (That's something Adobe is not doing automatically,