Many months after being discarded by developers, Adobe is now finally set to kill Flash officially. The company has announced that it will no longer update and distribute the Flash Player by the end of 2020.
Adobe is encouraging content developers to switch to an open format like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly. However, the Flash Player will continue to receive support through 2020. "Several industries and businesses have been built around Flash technology -- including gaming, education and video -- and we remain committed to supporting Flash through 2020, as customers and partners put their migration plans into place," the company writes in a detailed blog post.
Leading web browsers -- including Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox -- already discontinued Flash support. Likewise, services like Facebook, Skype and Twitter lately abandoned Flash plugin requirements to deliver a faster and advanced experience.
Proprietary offering
In an open letter, Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs had once alleged Flash as a "100 percent proprietary" offering. "Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the Web should be open," Jobs wrote in the letter.
Adobe has interestingly acknowledged the closeness of Flash as its prime failure in the market. "Over time, we've seen helper apps evolve to become plugins and more recently, have seen many of these plugins capabilities get incorporated into open web standards," the company stated.
Google, being an advocate for open web standards, has highlighted the obscurity of Flash in the fast-growing world of Web. The company reveals in a separate blog post that usage of Flash on its Chrome browser has declined from 80 percent three years ago to just 17 percent now. "This trend reveals that sites are migrating to open web technologies, which are faster and more power-efficient than Flash. They are also more secure, so you can be safer while shopping, banking or reading sensitive documents," the search giant wrote.
Going forward, Adobe is weighing plans to continue its contribution towards the HTML5 standard and participate in the WebAssembly community. This would emerge as an ultimate goal by the Flash maker that had once dominated the Web.
