Adobe Flash, one of the most controversial elements of the web, will be phased out by 2020, Adobe said Tuesday. Browser makers, including Microsoft and Google, simultaneously announced plans for a gradual phaseout over the next few years.
Adobe said that enough progress had been made within open web standards like HTML5 that it was time to phase out Flash. “Adobe and Macromedia provided innovation to the web, through browser plug-ins, before the underlying web standards could support the interactivity and creativity our digital media publishers and consumers craved,” the company said in a blog post. “By the end of 2020, we firmly believe that all of these required media capabilities and standards will be widely deployed and natively available to customers within browsers.”
Specifically, Adobe Flash will be end-of-lifed by 2020, the company said, meaning that it simply won’t work. That will have dramatic effects on sites like Newgrounds, which evolved into a repository for Flash-authored (and HTML5) content. For many, though, Flash was simply seen at least as a nuisance, and at worst a serious security risk.
Flash-based exploits have circulated for years, in a game of cat-and-mouse between hackers and Adobe itself. In 2015, for example, hackers jumped on a Flash exploit as an opportunity to infect computers with malware. In response, Mozilla’s Firefox blocked Flash by default until Adobe issued a patch. Security issues aside, PCWorld also found that Flash slowed down browsers by as much as 80 percent.
Over time, browser makers either began blocking Flash by default or at least asking users to enable it, a feature known as click-to-run. Today, sites need to ask your permission to run Flash within Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. (Edge remembers your choice for future visits.)
[Source”timesofindia”]
