Adobe to kill off Flash Player

According to an announcement made by Adobe, it will finally kill its Flash Player soon.

Expected to end by 2020, various firms including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox have been blocking Flash for more than a year now.

As per the statistics provided by Adobe, back in 2014, the Chrome users using Flash were over 80% which reduced to 17% now due to Flash’s alternatives. The main reason for actually killing the Flash Player was the lack of security.

Tech Juice informs that Apple was among the initial companies to block Flash when Steve Jobs ended Flash support in iOS in 2007. In Job’s open letter ‘Thoughts on Flash’ he explained why Adobe is unsuitable for mobile devices. It stated few reasons which included poor reliability, security and performance. He also said that Flash reduces battery life and that there are now better video formats.

Back at that time, Adobe got angry over these accusations but now, according to an Adobe spokesperson, “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 the new open formats.”

However, organizations such as Google, Apple, Mozilla and Microsoft are devoted to support Flash till its death. Microsoft says it will remove Flash by default in Edge and Internet Explorer by 2019 but will support it till 2020. Mozilla and Safari users can install Flash separately and will be able to choose the website that can access Flash. However, Chrome will continue with Flash pre-installed until 2010 but it is already blocking Flash content by default, reported The Verge.

This end of support for Flash by 2020 is a warning to the creators so that they could progress towards better standard or else they would be blocked out of the web.