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 EOL Flash Player support page released by Adobe earlier this month, six months before EOL.
Adobe says that as soon as Flash reaches EOL, the company not only intends to stop providing updates, but also intends to remove all Flash Player download links from its website.
This will prevent users from reinstalling the software and continuing to use an unsupported version.
Additionally, Adobe said that "content using Flash will be blocked from Adobe Flash Player after EOL," suggesting that the company has added or plans to add a "time bomb" to the code of Flash Player 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 at the end of the year, Adobe does not plan 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 Facebook, which, at the time, was heavily using Flash for its online gaming platform.
Ever since the EOL announcement Facebook has asked game makers to change technology προτρέποντάς τους να δοκιμάσουν HTML5 και JavaScript. Browser companies 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%.
