Adobe asks users to uninstall Flash Player from their systems by the end of the year, as well as the software planned to stop being supported (End-Of-Life or EOL), on December 31, 2020.
The announcement was added to a new one σελίδα Flash Player EOL support that Adobe published earlier this month, six months before EOL.
Adobe states that once Flash reaches its EOL date, the company δεν σκοπεύει απλώς να σταματήσει να παρέχει ενημερώσεις, αλλά σκοπεύει επίσης να αφαιρέσει και όλους τους συνδέσμους λήψηof Flash Player from its website.
This will prevent users from reinstalling the software and continuing to use an unsupported version.
In addition, Adobe stated that "content that uses Flash will be excluded from Adobe Flash Player after EOL", indicating that the company has added or plans to add a "time bomb" to the Flash Player code to prevent its use from next year.
The reason for these moves is because Flash Player has always been (and is) the best target for hackers and malware developers. Once Flash Player reaches EOL later this year, Adobe has no plans to release new security updates, leaving Flash users exposed to new vulnerabilities and attacks.
Adobe announced the EOL of Flash in July 2017 along with all major browser manufacturers, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, but also the Facebook, which, at the time, was heavily using Flash for its online gaming platform.
From the announcement of EOL onwards, Facebook asked game developers to change technology, urging them to try HTML5 and JavaScript. Browser companies have disabled Flash in their respective programs.
Browser developers plan to remove all Flash-supported code from their browsers shortly before or after EOL, in late 2020, and early 2021.
Currently, according with web technology research site W3Techs, only 2,6% of today's websites use Flash, a number that has fallen sharply since 2011 when it was 28,5%.
