Adobe has long played a leadership role in advancing interactivity and creative content – from video, to games and more – on the web. Where we’ve seen a need to push content and interactivity forward, we’ve innovated to meet those needs. Where a format didn’t exist, we invented one – such as with Flash and Shockwave. And over time, as the web evolved, these new formats were adopted by the community, in some cases formed the basis for open standards, and became an essential part of the web.
But as open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the web. Over time, we’ve seen helper apps evolve to become plugins, and more recently, have seen many of these plugin capabilities get incorporated into open web standards. Today, most browser vendors are integrating capabilities once provided by plugins directly into browsers and deprecating plugins.
Given this progress, and the collaboration of several technology giants – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – Adobe has planned to 'switch off' Flash. Specifically, they will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020. They encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.
Firefox and Chrome keep notifying users when visiting flash enabled sites that they will stop working at the very same date. Thus get prepared, any site you depend on, is using Flash, you will not be able to open or run (if you are the owner/hoster) by the end of this year.
