Adobe will hammer the final nail in the coffin for Flash on December 31, 2020. As announced by Adobe in July 2017, open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured and are viable alternatives for web content (translation: Adobe admitted that Flash technology is becoming obsolete).
I suspect that Adobe’s announcement was a bitter pill for them to swallow because there was a lot of bickering between Apple and Adobe about the role of Flash on the web, especially because Flash is not well suited to touch-based gestures on mobile devices, and Apple had experienced tremendous success with the iPhone (released in 2007) and had recently released the iPad (on April 3, 2010). This in part led to Apple’s release of its famous “Thoughts on Flash” open letter on April 29, 2010 which is no longer available on Apple’s website, but fortunately I saved it and posted it here. As the late Steve Jobs summarized:
“Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.”
As stated in its announcement, Adobe will not provide security updates for Flash Player after the end-of-life date, and they recommend that all users uninstall Flash Player before the end of 2020. Today I received the notification to uninstall Flash from my 2007 iMac running Mac OS X 10.11.6 (El Capitan).
I have not yet received the notification on my 2012 iMac or 2016 MacBook Pro but expect to see the notifications on those machines in the near future. If you are not prompted to uninstall Flash, you can do so manually. Simply follow the instructions that Adobe provides for Mac and Windows. Thank you Adobe for giving us the opportunity to enjoy many years of interactive Flash-based web content and for serving as a springboard to bigger and better things.
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