Adobe is finally planning to lay its deeply hated Flash platform to rest and the internet is bloody cheering.
Flash has been a staple of internet browsing since the 90s and was required to run internet cartoons and games like those found on Newgrounds.com. I’m sure we all remember the horrors of Salad Fingers, no?
As the platform became more complicated, it allowed users to do more with it, but it also became a colossal pain in the ass. It was the easiest way for hackers to get all up inside your computer and was responsible for countless crashes and other issues. Laptop users will also be aware of how viscously draining it was to battery life.
Apple hasn’t used the platform for ages because of how tremendously broken it is and Google banned it from Chrome about a year ago. Finally, Adobe has accepted that Flash is nothing more than a corpse that needs to be buried. Not right away, though, it will support the platform up until 2020.
The company praised the accomplishments achieved by Flash in their release before announcing its impending dismissal.
“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.”
Good riddance, Flash. You were once great, but now just in the way.
Photo: David Firth / Salad Fingers.
