Goodbye Flash: Adobe Will Kill Off Flash As We Know It By 2020

Adobe has revealed its plans to end official support for this deprecated platform by 2020. This decision stems from a declining usage based on statistics. There has a drastic reduction in the number of chrome visitors that used flash- 80% of chrome users visited a site daily with flash in 2014, against the 17% that do today.

Noteworthy, is the fact that Flash grew in popularity over the years and in fact became one if the most widely used means which people devised to watch video clips and play games online. Nevertheless, it suffered considerable backlash from notable tech companies which resulted in its demise. It was flawed in very sensitive areas and Apple was the first to ring the alarm.

Late Steve Jobs, wrote an essay downgrading the technology for having poor design for touchscreen devices and for having security loopholes. Flash’s poor design was a key reason for the technology not supporting flash. Jobs also blamed Apple’s Mac computers crash on the vulnerability of flash’s security.

As flash grew in popularity, criminals devised means to take advantage of “security vulnerability in the technology” and hack into people’s computers. Frustrated by this loophole, notable technology companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Mozilla began to drift away. The endless tech headlines on the vulnerability of flash was a nightmare and in fact the greatest contributing factor to its demise.

Newer technologies like HTML5 coding language to display video and interactive games became the option for other tech companies. In fact, Google and Microsoft have decided to favor HTML5 within their respective web browser.

Govind Balakrishnan, Adobe’s vice president of product development for its creative cloud business has revealed that Adobe will collaborate with major tech companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft to gradually put an end to Adobe. For him, other rival technologies like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly are capable enough to provide similar operations as the Adobe although, security updates will still be provided for flash until it finally phases out in 2020.

The idea of a lengthy time frame is to get the users to switch more naturally to an alternative as “Adobe won’t like to leave them hanging”.