Goodbye Adobe Flash Player

We knew this day would come—on December 31, 2020, Adobe will officially end support for Flash Player. The company will block the execution of Flash content starting January 12, 2021. This is the end of an era.This means two things: Adobe will no longer release updates for Flash Player, and users will no longer be able to download it, while the plugin itself will refuse to play Flash content. These steps are just part of the entire industry's move away from Flash.[caption id="attachment_241" align="alignnone" width="1024"] AFP, image source: primeinspiration.com[/caption]**Reasons**Back in the summer of 2017, Adobe announced the discontinuation of Flash Player in 2020, citing the rise of competing technologies such as HTML5, WebGL, WebAssembly, and Unity, which had become mature enough to serve as alternatives to Flash Player. By providing a three-year notice, Adobe hoped to give developers, designers, companies, and others enough time to migrate their Flash content to new standards.More realistically, Flash failed to conquer smartphones and increasingly lost ground among browsers. According to W3Techs, only 2.3% of today's websites use Flash. Steve Jobs criticized Flash in an open letter in 2010, and the iPhone and iPad never supported this standard. Safari was the first browser to drop Flash support.Moreover, Adobe Flash Player was popular not only among users but also among attackers who exploited platform vulnerabilities to infect users with malware. The update page shows 292 fixes over the last 14 years. Vulnerabilities allowed attackers to compromise users through ads and spread ransomware.Despite its security flaws, Flash Player played a crucial role in the history of the entire Internet. It helped introduce and popularize interactive content such as web animations, multimedia players, and streaming technologies. All of these were initially supported via Flash before being ported to CSS, JavaScript, and HTML5.[caption id="attachment_242" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Required AFP, image source: dailydot.com[/caption]**Consequences and Actions**Flash-based websites will no longer work as they used to. At the same time, most browsers have already been moving in this direction for some time. For example, Chrome blocks Flash by default and requires permission in settings. We assume that commercially viable websites will completely stop using Flash and switch to another platform if they haven't already. Older and less frequently updated sites will simply stop working, and their traffic will likely "plummet."Adobe recommends uninstalling Flash Player, and this is reasonable. Any bugs and flaws will no longer be fixed. It won't become dangerous or unreliable overnight, but continuing to use it is not the best idea. Also, beware of potential fake installers.Some sites are trying to preserve Flash Player. Newgrounds, with the support of The New York Times, announced a project to emulate Flash using the Rust programming language in 2019. The emulator can be used as a standalone client-side application or embedded into web pages using WebAssembly technology. Meanwhile, initiatives like Flashpoint and the Internet Archive are collecting and archiving thousands of games and animations.Flash will go away, but much of what it generated over the years will remain. Nevertheless, there is a certain vague sadness in its demise. The feeling is similar to the launch of Winamp.