RIP Flash
 

The last ever update for Adobe Flash was released Tuesday. Support ends 12/31, and, if you don't uninstall it, the player will block any content starting 1/12/21.

It will be interesting to see how many sites haven't bothered converting to HTML5, even through Adobe started encouraging the switch 5+ years ago.

It had a good run. But it was time. Actually, long past time.

you slow, insecure, memory-hogging, buggy thing. you wont be missed

Thank God! It wasn't good from Day 1 and Adobe didn't seem to know or care about making it good any time since then.

Laughably, a few of the Continuing Education websites our office uses were still requiring Flash even as late as this month. I've just told them we can't run it here and they scratch their heads.

I agree!!!

I product I specialise in still uses Flash for some of its GUI. A new version came out earlier this year with Flash replaced by HTML5, but it's a huge enterprise upgrade (requiring infrastructure upgrades also). I suspect many customers don't realise that some functionality will break as soon as they upgrade their browsers.

It should keep me busy for the next year advising on the upgrade process :D

Hopefully this will speed some of our VMware updates. Some of our older servers still only support the flash version of vsphere (or worse, the old client).

This is a big problem in education, non-flash versions of the courseware exist but the publishers are gouging for it.

My sister's school has just been screen capturing some of the lessons rather than pay for the upgrade.

But... all the Strong Bad Emails are still in Flash...

What's worse is the stuff that doesn't normally get updated. Recently I was looking at a blog post--referencing a missing chart. The chart was done in Flash. At least I run the Flashblock extension so I knew what had happened.

I'm guessing Adobe doesn't want to be on the hook for any possible future security issues that are found, hence the update that explicitly kills itself?

Anyway, Flash was pretty nice for some of the earlier popular internet games and such, so I do feel nostalgia for it. Not sure keeping it around is worth the security/maintainability nightmare, though.

Good riddance!

Next up, iTunes! Another piece of crap.