Adobe Will Discontinue Flash in 2020
Adobe (Hacker News, MacRumors):
But as open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the web. Over time, we’ve seen helper apps evolve to become plugins, and more recently, have seen many of these plugin capabilities get incorporated into open web standards. Today, most browser vendors are integrating capabilities once provided by plugins directly into browsers and deprecating plugins.
Given this progress, and in collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.
Previously: Thoughts on Flash.
Update (2017-07-27): See also: John Nack, Dan Masters.
3 Comments RSS · Twitter
While it is not the main subject of our post, Gary Tyrrell and I put our quick takes at http://fleen.com/2017/07/28/for-some-sense-lets-head-across-the-ocean/ .
Yeah, I hope there's a way to preserve this history. This shows how bad it is to trust proprietary formats. As soon as they're no longer economically viable, companies stop supporting them, and then all of that history is just inaccessible.
I hope they end up open-sourcing the runtime. Lots of late 90s/early 00s Internet games, animations, and other creative works were in Flash... would be a shame if they get lost to time.