By Melissa Cox
Your commercial awareness dose
After Adobe announced they would be discontinuing their computer software Flash Player in 2017, the process to eradicate Flash from people’s devices has finally begun. Adobe has announced that is has stopped all support for Flash from December 31, 2020, which means Adobe will also no longer release security updates for the software and are encouraging people to uninstall it as soon as possible.
Adobe Flash player was released in 1996 and quickly became a huge success on the early internet. A plug-in extension that people installed and updated, that allowed them to access various content across the web. Flash allowed people to stream multimedia content such as high-quality videos and animations on platforms such as YouTube, as well as allowing people to create and play interactive online games. According to Adobe, by 2009, 99 per cent of internet-connected desktop PCs had Flash installed.
Despite Adobe Flash’s wild success, unfortunately, they were slow to adapt to the uprising of smartphones and failed to become compatible quickly enough. This attracted an onslaught of criticism, one critic being the late Co-Founder of Apple, Steve Jobs. Jobs wrote an open letter in 2010 explaining why the use of Flash would not be permitted on iPhones and iPads. A few of Jobs’ main points were that Flash was incompatible with touch screens, there were security issues and battery life was quickly drained.
Another point Jobs touched on was the emergence of alternative software that was far more efficient than Flash. HTML5 was a software that quickly became popular as it still allowed for multimedia to be consumed but without requiring users to install and constantly update it. Other popular alternatives were Web Assembly and WebGL, all of which is what is widely used today. By 2011, Adobe announced that the development of Flash for mobile devices would be ended.
From that point, a decline in the use of Flash began and by 2015 Apple had disabled Flash in their web browser Safari and Google had begun blocking Flash content from their web browser Google Chrome. In 2015 also, Adobe themselves even began recommending that developers make the move to HTML5 and use that instead of Flash. The need for Flash continued to dwindle as large companies such as Netflix, Facebook and YouTube no longer used Flash anymore.
It is likely that the move away from Flash made by big companies is what led to Adobe announcing their plans to discontinue the software in 2017. By 2018, less than 5 per cent of worldwide websites were using Flash, and JavaScript became the new favourite in its place. Various security issues were another factor with reports of even North Korean hackers exploiting the software to gain access to Microsoft Office documents and spam emails.
Although Adobe planned to discontinue their support for Flash on December 31, 2020, in October Microsoft began the process by releasing an optional update to remove Flash permanently for Windows 10 users, as well as preventing the software from being re-installed. Major browsers shut down the use of Flash on January 1 and on January 12 Adobe will stop multimedia content running on Flash Player.
Adobe is also encouraging people with messages on their website to un-install Flash as they will no longer be supporting it with updates. Those who still have Flash installed can visit the website that Adobe has created, providing people with a step-by-step guide on how to uninstall Flash from their device.
There are some who are concerned that years’ worth of content built using Flash will be lost forever. However, there are developers working on new software that will support content previously supported by Flash. A blog named “The Internet Archive” is currently holding over 2,000 items that were supported by Flash and that people hope to revive in the future.
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