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Adobe Announces that in 2020, Flash Player Will Reach Its 'End-of-Life' in Light of Newer Technologies (webkit.org)
Adobe said on Tuesday it will stop distributing and updating Flash Player at the end of 2020 and is encouraging web developers to migrate any existing Flash content to open standards. Apple is working with Adobe, industry partners, and developers to complete this transition. From a blog post: Apple users have been experiencing the web without Flash for some time. iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch never supported Flash. For the Mac, the transition from Flash began in 2010 when Flash was no longer pre-installed. Today, if users install Flash, it remains off by default. Safari requires explicit approval on each website before running the Flash plugin.
In a blog post, the company wrote: "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 in collaboration with several of our technology partners -- including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla -- Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. 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."
In a blog post, the company wrote: "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 in collaboration with several of our technology partners -- including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla -- Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. 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."
Hallelujah!
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
Maybe by 2040 or so Major League Baseball Advanced Media will finally ditch Flash Player for HTML5 to show baseball games. Believe it or not an outfit that is positively drowning in cash just can't be bothered to update their web players. Seriously!
slashdot: A failed experiment.
Why would they even do this? Has the security situation gotten to the point where their hand is being forced or do they simply want to abandon their technical debt in the same manner that any industrial operation wishes to abandon their industrial waste, into the commons?
No. They renamed the production suite to Animate because Flash wasn't the only supported output format, and they were already (almost certainly) planning to deprecate SWF.
Now, if the many sites that still assume it's present and default to it over HTML5 could finally start working properly when Flash isn't available, the Internet will be a much better place. I'm looking at you [crappy TV news channel websites of your choice goes here].
https://youtu.be/L0nuQ5o2DYU
Their production tool already supports HTML5/JS. Hardware acceleration and security are both a huge cross-platform headache that browser vendors have already taken on. And they still haven't been allowed on the iPhone with Flash.
They're only dragging their feet because of complaints of content producers.
Most of what we need the internet for is being replaced and overshadowed by graphic-heavy bells & whistles. We could use the internet safely if we applied a more minimalist approach to design and if we standardized video or dynamic UI for the internet better than we are now.
Ethics watchdogs need to step up and start really trying hard to break the current push for more javascript.
The web browser should display a page that can be interacted with effectively and efficiently, without all the added bells & whistles, because those bells & whistles are often introduced to create security vectors for black hatters.
Most people using the internet have limited safety understanding. Flash is one of those platforms that can seriously harm a computer if the Flash object is designed as malware. Couple this with the loose security in users still using IE that often utilizes ActiveX and the results are predictably negative.
MSFT can try as much as they want but I'll never trust them very much and everything they release has to be combed through by teams of 3rd party security experts in order to protect their clients.
Again, using Firefox & Noscript, coupled with a given user's paranoia, will prevent most malware type issues.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The day they end support for Flash there will be millions of vulnerable PC's with Flash installed that will never be patched. We're still going to be dealing with Flash problems for years to come, there just won't be any more security patches. It'll be open season with all the 0-days.
This can't happen soon enough. Might see about getting placed in a medically induced coma until then.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
This is a Pyrrhic victory at best. The alternatives often aren't any better, and in many ways are worse.
At least with Flash we had the ability to just not install the plugin, or to remove it or disable it if it were installed, and then we wouldn't be forced to endure it.
But that's not always the case with these built-in technologies. It's even worse with some of the JavaScript-based ones. It can become much harder, if not impossible, to separate "good" JavaScript from "unwanted" JavaScript for any given page. At least when Flash was used we could just block that part of a web page, without necessarily breaking the entire site. Having to dick around with an extension like NoScript to partially block scripts often doesn't work, especially when a site combines useful and unwanted JavaScript code into a single script.
WebAssembly is particularly insidious. While minified or obfuscated JavaScript can be difficult enough to decipher, WASM's binary encoding makes it even harder to figure out what remotely-served code executing in the browser will actually try to do. It's like Java applets all over again.
It's much the same for the embedded audio and video capabilities of modern browsers. They can be useful when they're wanted, but this also leaves them open to abuse (such as when used for advertising purposes).
We've gone from getting screwed in one way to getting screwed in a slightly different way, and neither of these screwings feels good.
I was a Flash aficionado back in the early 2000s. Back then it was a good way to get something moving on your page or to provide a bit of interactivity. HTML 5 was some way off, iFrames were clunky, and JavaScript libraries like jQuery weren't very mature yet. Plus the player had a small footprint and was pretty widely installed on the browsers of the time. For a time it was a great way to deliver video.
As a technology it was a decent stopgap measure IMHO but it was on borrowed time as open standards caught up. Not many slashdotters had anything positive to say about it because it was a closed standard, but I have fond memories of seeing what the future of the web looked like, even if it was implemented in a doomed technology.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Flash should be discontinued next year. OK, this year. :)
...long slow lingering undeath that will now be drawn out for another three years before the zombified corpse of a once ubiquitous application shudders to a halt, ekes out its last cry of "warning flash player is out of date" and collapses into a pile of dust. Was that what you had in mind because it seems to be what Adobe is planning?
I've subscribed to the NHL's streaming service over the past few years and they use the MLB's streaming service, MLB Advanced Media. Sadly it still requires flash on PC, which most browsers don't want you to use anymore. "Oh you want to watch in this browser, you must install flash for it. You installed it for that other browser last time, silly."
It is long past due to kill it with fire, nuke it from orbit, double tap it, etc.
2020 is a long time from now...
Once I can find a suitable website that has a free flash-based countdown tool.
Update your damn websites.
Both of you have iOS and Android apps which don't use Flash... so you apparently have (or know where to find) at least one or two people whose skill sets are less than a decade out of date.
It's not a particularly hard problem... so what's the holdup?
Sincerely,
A Paying Customer
#DeleteChrome
On Jan 1, 2021, they should send out an update that completely uninstalls and removes Flash, period.
Nothing short of that matters, millions of computers will remain infected, millions of websites will continue to be exploited.
... bout 50 seconds?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Thoughts on Flash
#DeleteFacebook
Do not vote for fear, do not vote for hate.
#DeleteFacebook
Because nobody uses Flash anymore. There is no designer in the world that can get work these days just on Flash. Flash has been dead, only there for legacy. There is also a huge amount of work to keep it maintained, the code goes back to the 90s at least and wasn't well written to begin with.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Adobe no longer updating Flash doesn't mean a lot. If a business hasn't switch thus far, they may not do so when Flash stops getting updates. Instead, we'll be left to using a no longer supported Flash with vulnerabilities (as always pop up with Flash) to access sites that don't invest in moving their sites to HTML5 or other modern options.
I hope VMWare gets it act together and comes up with some better technology for vCenter soon enough.
I couldn't ever figure out why change the lean, relatively fast and responsive vSphere client to the flash-based mess. At least you can still do most things via vSphere but some need the web interface (e.g. vMotion where you move both the VM and the data in case the VM is stored on local drives).
At least Cisco has gotten rid of it for their IMC modules (for some servers, not all).
The browsers will just disable the plug-in by default. Problem solved.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm gonna miss the casual browser games with the sweet stylized graphics you only find in Flash games. What is the replacement easy to use programming and creation environment for artists?
I assure you that if you had the original .fla, the game would compile to HTML5/JS just fine in Adobe Animate.
What steps would the parent of the child who wants to play the game go about tracking down the author of the file in order to initiate conversion? And whose responsibility would it be to fund a month of access to Creative Cloud for each author whose works are affected?
Or a reasonable facsimile could be recreated.
Provided the author doesn't sue anyone whose "reasonable facsimile" becomes popular.
Dynamic UI = JavaScript. Anything else is static.
The last time we discussed the pros and cons of JavaScript and WebAssembly, the consensus in the comments appeared to be that people want web pages ought to be static apart from form submission and CSS checkbox hack menus. For dynamic UI, make a native application that users can download, install, and use.
It's not like [classic SWF games are] going to be ported to HTML5; that would be a lot of work.
The majority of work would be in tracking down the authors for the FLA source files and providing a rental of Adobe Animate CC with which to exporting them to HTML5.
Open up the .fla file in Adobe Animate
The difference is that like Macromedia Flash before it, Adobe Flash allows resale of a used copy, whereas Adobe Animate does not because it's offered exclusively through the Creative Cloud rental service. Someone who bought a used copy of Adobe Flash may not feel it worth it to continue to pony up for Creative Cloud every month for the rest of his life.
Way ahead of you
I thought Adobe already had an announcement to kill its Flash years ago.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
So long, Flash. Slash.
=kw= lurkin' to please
Well, they did try to open-source the programming language as an extension of ECMA-Script.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Maybe now some of the holdouts that I encounter that still use Flash (ABC Australia iView catch-up TV for one) will finally stop using Flash and start using HTML5.
Because Apple point blank refused to allow flash on the iPhone.
As a result, Adobe sticking to their guns on flash and content creation for flash caused web developers to look elsewhere.
Adobe decided the way forward was to refresh their content creation tools (where they actually make money) to help developers with non-flash content.
With that in theory done, the flash platform represents a cost, and their whole marketing message is now that you don't need flash, so they are paying for something that, per their own messaging, doesn't advance the value of their authoring tools.
The places using flash still are generally not revenue sources for Adobe right now. They are sites that authored their stuff ages ago and have not bought into new authoring tools. In a way, telling those developers 'your platform is dead, your users are going to evaporate,.... *unless* you buy our snazzy new authoring tools to help refresh your site to modern status!"
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I haven't seen one in years. The cheapest ones I purchased 5 years ago had ActiveX but also could work with "Other browsers" which was just MJPEG. I've got one that's over 7 years old where the JavaScript was so crappy it stopped working altogether in modern browsers but no Flash.
I've actually seen some that use a Flash interface more than a decade ago but very few that encode in the Flash codec (which is a predecessor of WebM BTW)
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Done: Lynx
You are technically correct. Pardon my moving the goalposts, but I had browsers in wide interactive use among English speakers in mind. Wikipedia's article about that browser gives no indication of usage share, and most sources found through Google lynx browser usage share lump it into "Other", which isn't helpful.
Netscape 2.0 also counts
Pardon my moving the goalposts, but I had browsers that still receive security updates in mind. The 2.0 series no longer receives security updates. When Netscape Navigator as a whole ended support, it had become a reskin of Mozilla Firefox, and users were advised to switch to Firefox. But Firefox runs JavaScript without asking and hides the preference not to behind about:config, which in turn is unreachable without a web search.