Adobe has just announced that it will be retiring it Flash Player at the end of 2020 in a historic decision that will affect many products, including the operating system Windows of Microsoft.
With Flash still widely adopted around the world, but with new, fast-paced, open standards, Adobe says it is meaningful to remove Flash Player, and it is now encouraging developers and content creators to use different applications.
Although many products will be affected, Adobe says it is working with various companies to make the removal of Flash Player as smooth as possible. So the company reportedly works with: Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Mozilla and Google.
“But as open standards such as HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly have matured in recent years, most offer many features and functions who take the lead. Plugins have become a viable alternative for content on the web.” says Adobe.
"Over time we've seen utilities evolve and become plugins and many of them have the ability to add and integrate with open web standards. Today, most software vendors browsing embed features provided by plugins directly into browsers and leave the plugins themselves. "
We've been expecting this new one, many times, as Flash Player is one of its most vulnerable software releases, and is used in today's modern applications, such as browsers. Adobe's decision is certainly great, especially because for the full retirement of the application it will take 8 years.
Adobe says it will continue to provide security updates for browsers and operating systems using Flash until the end of 2020.
Microsoft has already announced that it will also remove Flash from Windows and its browsers by the end of 2020 and similar steps are expected to be taken by other companies using Adobe software.