Η Adobe ζητάει από τους users να απεγκαταστήσουν το Flash Player from their systems by the end of the year, as well as the software planned να σταματήσει να υποστηρίζεται (End-Of-Life ή EOL), στις 31 Δεκεμβρίου του 2020.
The announcement was added to a new support page Flash player EOL 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.
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 Flash EOL in July 2017 along with all major browser makers, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, but also Facebook, which at the time relied heavily on Flash for platform of its online games.
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%.
