Adobe retires Flash in December 2020

Martin Brinkmann
Jul 25, 2017
Updated • Jul 25, 2017
Internet
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Adobe announced today that it plans to retire Adobe Flash in December 2020 when it will stop updating and distributing Flash.

The company suggests that developers switch from using Flash to modern web technologies such as HMTL5, WebGL or WebAssembly.

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.

Adobe will support Flash "on a number of major" operating systems and browsers that support Flash currently. This includes 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP to 10, Mac OS X 10.9 or later, and packages for Linux.

As far as browsers are concerned, Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, Chrome and Opera are supported on Windows. On Mac OS X, the browsers are Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Opera, and on Linux, Firefox and Chrome are supported.

The reason that Adobe gives for ending Flash support is that web technology has matured and support many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins introduced to the browsing world.

Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and Facebook have published announcements of their own highlighting the End of Life for Flash.

Mozilla updated its plugin roadmap for Firefox and adjusted it based on Adobe's end of support announcement.

  • 2018 Second Half -- Firefox users have to enable Flash on each session they want to use Flash.
  • 2019 Early -- Firefox will display a visible warning to users if a site uses Flash.
  • 2019 -- Flash is disabled by default. Users won't be prompted anymore to enable Flash, but Flash may still be activated on certain sites by users.
  • 2020-- Flash support is removed from Firefox. Firefox ESR continues to support Flash until the end of 2020.
  • 2021 -- Firefox won't load the Flash plugin anymore when Adobe stops shipping security updates for Flash in December 2020

Microsoft announced on the Microsoft Edge development blog how it plans to retire Adobe Flash in company products

  • 2018 -- Microsoft Edge requires users to enable Flash for each session individually. Internet Explorer continues to allow Flash.
  • 2019 mid to late -- Flash is disabled by default in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer. Users have options to re-enable Flash.
  • 2020 end -- Adobe Flash is removed from Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer. Flash cannot be run anymore.

Google announced on the company blog that Flash will be retired in Google Chrome as well.The company did not publish a roadmap but stated that it will remove Flash completely from Google Chrome toward the end of 2020.

Closing Words

Flash will be retired at the end of 2020. This means that it will be supported for the next two and a half years by Adobe and major browser developers.

This should give sites that rely on Flash ample time to develop plugin-less versions of their services using modern web technologies.

Now You: What's your take on the end of Flash?

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Adobe retires Flash in December 2020
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Adobe retires Flash in December 2020
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Adobe announced today that it plans to retire Adobe Flash in December 2020 when it will stop updating and distributing Flash.
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Comments

  1. dbpvr said on November 5, 2019 at 10:01 pm
    Reply

    yeah so now we’ll see that stupid announcement info-bar for 2 years unless we disable flash right now grrr…

  2. Donivan said on October 2, 2019 at 3:49 pm
    Reply

    OH No! I Hope a lot of games are saved cause thats what i mainly used flash for, Im gonna miss it but when the games are saved im not gonna be too worried, aslong as Raze 1,2,3,4,5 aresaved, and the “BeGone” FPS games are saved its fine

  3. ApollisLeonardis said on August 15, 2019 at 11:01 pm
    Reply

    Never had a problem with flash, only used it to view animations on dA

  4. Kubrick said on August 25, 2017 at 12:59 pm
    Reply

    well until the few gamesites i use refuse flash then i shall continue using flash for years to come.There are no viable html5 escape/adventure gamesites anywhere.Until recently i was using flash 11.2 for years with no issues.

    1. chesscanoe said on August 25, 2017 at 1:22 pm
      Reply

      You certainly avoided installing a huge number of security fixes for Flash. Glad to hear you were not inconvenienced by this decision.

  5. Curtis K said on July 30, 2017 at 11:25 am
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    Don’t register/login with Deezer as they are using Flash for “Security Reasons”. Source: https://twitter.com/Deezer/status/539344616580194304

    The epic reply: “What are the security reasons?” https://twitter.com/iamstarkov/status/890222559324774400

  6. Anonymous said on July 29, 2017 at 3:45 pm
    Reply
  7. TelV said on July 28, 2017 at 6:19 pm
    Reply

    @ popi, there’s no Reply button underneath your post in which you mentioned that FutureWave approached Adobe with a view to selling them the company. To be exact, you said, quote: “It was Macromedia who made the Flash great. FutureWave first approached Adobe to acquire them but was turned down”. Unquote.

    I have to contradict your statement there since FutureWave didn’t approach Adobe with a view to offering them the whole company, but rather to try and sell them a product called “FutureSplash”. See the third paragraph under the heading “FutureWave” in this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#FutureWave

  8. pespacova said on July 28, 2017 at 10:50 am
    Reply

    Good news, but it should already have gone a long time ago.

    Paradoxical security policies by Microsoft:

    * Provide flash component to IE that cannot be uninstalled with all Windows 10 installations.
    * Force Windows updates via liveupdate under the guise of concerned security.

    Solution, Use NTlite and remove flash, CCEIP/asimov (because MS doesnt care about user feedback so they shouldnt demand telemetry under the guise of improving the product when they clearly only improve what they want and force the rest down everyones throats.)

  9. Anonymous said on July 28, 2017 at 10:49 am
    Reply

    Good news, but it should already have gone a long time ago.

    Paradoxical security policies by Microsoft:

    * Provide flash component to IE that cannot be uninstalled with all Windows 10 installations.
    * Force Windows updates via liveupdate under the guise of concerned security.

    Solution, Use NTlite and remove flash, CCEIP/asimov (because MS doesnt care about user feedback so they shouldnt demand telemetry under the guise of improving the product when they clearly only improve what they want and force the rest down everyones throats.)

  10. Forlorn said on July 26, 2017 at 11:49 am
    Reply

    So long and thanks for all the fish, buddy.

  11. giggidy said on July 26, 2017 at 11:21 am
    Reply

    Only thing flash player is good for is visiting old porn tube sites and online games that has not converted to html5

  12. AnorKnee Merce said on July 26, 2017 at 9:19 am
    Reply

    Adobe Flash-player failed mainly because website developers have to pay subscriptions for Flash which is bundled into the Adobe Creative Suite, while the HTML5 standard, led by Google/Youtube, was free. Flash was only free for website visitors.
    ……. Same reason the much more expensive Apple Macs lost out to Windows PCs during the 1990s.

    Before the arrival of free HTML5 during the early 2010s, Flash-player was the most popular and standard video-player plugin for websites = was a popular target for hackers, just like dominant Windows.
    ……. This shows that it takes about 10 years for a dominant computer platform to go extinct. Win 10.? Office 365.?

    1. Forlorn said on July 26, 2017 at 12:02 pm
      Reply

      Not to mention that web standards are in danger with the threat of Chrome monopoly. :/

    2. Forlorn said on July 26, 2017 at 11:50 am
      Reply

      Flash development was free, Adobe tools weren’t mandatory, especially past 2008. Even before that Adobe tools were extremely easy to crack and no small web developer would pay for them, only companies. Adobe knew, didn’t care at the time, it’s what helped Flash grow so ubiquitous.

      Flash died because of politics. It was killed way too soon and the web lost at least 5 years of advancement. Now that we have finally caught up it can rest. And it’s better to have web standards but the web has been stalled for an eternity as the W3C and browser makers were reinventing the wheel after the motorcycle was destroyed.

      1. Forlorn said on July 28, 2017 at 11:28 am
        Reply

        Probably talking about WebAssembly ? Or WebGL 2 maybe ?

        Either way Flash isn’t more advanced or faster than those. Unity plugin was, and it has been killed too. The web has caught up with Flash but not Unity, it still needs multi-threading and SIMD, and WebGL 2 is good but not enough.

        But at this point that’s pretty niche, only high class games really benefited from Unity plugin. Once these features reach web standards though, any site can use it for other things than games, so it’s clearly a win even when viewed from that angle, but so. much. time. was. wasted. And people masturbate over Flash’s death without knowing anything else but the security side of the argument; which was used afterwards, after the murder, which occurred for completely different reasons related to market control and business strategy.

      2. popi said on July 26, 2017 at 8:48 pm
        Reply

        I agree it’s dead because of politics. I don’t know if the WebGL will be ready by 2020 or not, now games on WebGL are laggy and buggy. Maybe we will only have simple web games in 2020.

  13. Curtis K said on July 26, 2017 at 6:35 am
    Reply

    Epic news for the day :)

  14. Anonymous said on July 26, 2017 at 4:43 am
    Reply

    2020: Never had problem with Flash, I’ll miss it. Also W7 the last OS of Microsoft > end of support, and Firefox will almost disappear from the market share, sad.

    1. anonymous said on August 17, 2019 at 9:19 pm
      Reply

      I use Google Chrome which requires Flash for games I enjoy; guess gaming goes out the door for me b/c of :( I’ve no plans to go to Windows 10!!! Or Linux :(

    2. Forlorn said on July 28, 2017 at 11:48 am
      Reply

      Firefox : 20% market share in EU, average driven down by UK which is aligned to US so the score is noticeably lower than the rest of the EU.
      25% in Africa.
      15-20% in India.

      Firefox having a low market share is mostly a US-centered belief. If you’re not American, don’t colonize yourself, you’re worth more than that.

  15. jern said on July 26, 2017 at 1:47 am
    Reply

    The headline says it all…

    Mac OS Malware Targeting Biomed Sector May Come from Flash Player
    https://www.tnhonline.com/2017/02/08/mac-os-malware-targeting-biomed-sector-may-come-flash-player/

  16. CHEF-KOCH said on July 26, 2017 at 12:05 am
    Reply

    Was about time.

  17. neal said on July 26, 2017 at 12:01 am
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    Good for most people. I was never into flash games or whatever and I am sure there are people currently archiving the stuff even though I am sure some of the stuff will be lost in the transition unfortunately.

    For everyone else, there are no real downsides. Years back, Adobe didn’t even really have an automatic updater for Flash which meant that Flash was outdated and vulnerable to attack on every computer I used that I did not maintain. Flash would check weekly for new versions then a pop up would ask the user if they wanted to upgrade and then it require the user to manually update flash itself. Thus most people simply ignored the prompts. It took years for Adobe to get their heads out of their rear to finally add a true automatic updater and then finally sandbox.

    I also remember how buggy Flash was in Firefox. Any website that used a lot of Flash would momentarily freeze the Firefox tab it was on as it rendered. I remember some websites was all Flash…shudder. Some websites stooped to using invisible swf elements on their websites for the sole purpose of tracking their users using Adobe’s ill conceived super cookies courtesy of Flash.

    Good riddance for Flash’s retirement, the content delivered through flash could be great, but the platform itself was a security buggy nightmare.

    1. Forlorn said on July 28, 2017 at 11:43 am
      Reply

      Dude, tracking doesn’t need Flash at all.

  18. HK-Rapper said on July 25, 2017 at 9:52 pm
    Reply

    I can imagine a purely fictional dialogue like this at Adobe:

    A: “Mozilla and Google are banning Flash from the browsers with their future releases”
    B: “What can we do to safe face?”
    >Breaking News: Flash EOL 2020

    Not a single tear, flash was used long enough to spy on us:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_shared_object

  19. svim said on July 25, 2017 at 9:21 pm
    Reply

    Flash played a vital role for all of us back when accessing the Internet was still in its infancy. Credit needs to be duly noted as animation and user interaction back then was just beginning to become a reality. And while Adobe deserves a lot of praise for this, it also allowed Flash to morph into something of a resource draining, insecure menace infecting our web browsers for way too long now.
    So a big thank you and praise to Adobe, but I’ve had quite enough online drama.

    1. TelV said on July 26, 2017 at 1:32 pm
      Reply

      It’s not Adobe which deserves the praise, but rather a company called FutureWave Software. They produced an application called FutureSplash Animator back in 1995 which itself was a drawing program called SmartSketch to which they added frame-by-frame animation features. FutureWave was subsequently acquired by Macromedia which renamed the application to Macromedia Flash.

      Macromedia in turn was acquired by Adobe in December 2005.

      1. popi said on July 26, 2017 at 8:45 pm
        Reply

        It was Macromedia who made the Flash great. FutureWave first approached Adobe to acquire them but was turned down.

  20. TIm said on July 25, 2017 at 8:33 pm
    Reply

    “What’s your take on the end of Flash?”

    I’m not sad to see it go at all, however Flash was pretty incredible when it was first launched. It was amazing seeing what the likes of Hillman Curtis were doing with it in the early days when dial-up internet was severely limiting to anything moving.

  21. Appster said on July 25, 2017 at 8:18 pm
    Reply

    I am dancing in the streets right now, because of this…

  22. Yuliya said on July 25, 2017 at 7:29 pm
    Reply

    >Microsoft announced on the Microsoft Edge development blog how it plans to retire Adobe Flash in company products
    8 and 10 come with Flash built-in, I wonder how are they going to remove it?

    1. TIm said on July 25, 2017 at 8:32 pm
      Reply

      @Yuliya

      It has been possible to just turn it off for a while. In Internet Explorer you could either turn on Active X filtering so Flash doesn’t run unless you whitelist a site, or disable just the Flash Active X plugin in manage addons. In Edge you turn off ‘Use Adobe Flash Player’.

      I guess in 2020 they’ll just go that step further and remove everything related to the plugin in the Macromed folder such as FlashUtil_ActiveX.exe, etc..

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