Today is officially the last day for Adobe Flash Player. The company is shutting down Adobe Flash player from midnight today, December 31, 2020.
Although, Adobe will not start blocking Flash content until January 12th, major browsers will shut it all down tomorrow and Microsoft will block it in most versions of Windows.
This end has been a long time coming – since June 2017, officially; and unofficially, since April 2010, when Apple’s Steve Jobs announced that Flash would not run on iPhone brands.
Apple claimed that Flash didn’t work, adding that it was a sluggish app that drains battery. Whether this was true or not, it doesn’t matter anymore.
Read also: Google To Shutdown Play Music; Set To Focus On YouTube Music
Flash enjoyed huge cultural relevance and looms large in web history, which might be why its funeral procession has lasted for years.
Mainstream browsers started stopping support for Adobe flash player early in the last decade. And by 2015, Adobe asked developers to move on to HTML5. Things became official in 2017, when Adobe announced it would end support for its flash player in 2020.
For several years before memes became a household concept, Flash cartoons and games were a dominant form of internet culture.
“(Adobe Flash Player) was ridden with bugs and prone to getting hacked, especially as newer versions tried to keep up with the internet’s evolving speeds and file sizes; and browsers could handle better applications,” Tarah Wheeler, a cybersecurity fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said.
While Adobe is finally shutting down Flash, the app will continue to live on in many historical artifacts.
The Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, has an ongoing project to preserve the most influential games and videos that thrived during the days of Flash’s prominence.
The project will be preserving our best memories of Adobe Flash Player – a technology from an earlier era of the internet that helped spawn digital culture, and security breaches.
