Adobe To Kill Flash in 2020

It's been a tough week for the 90s PC geeks. After rallying around the near death of MS Paint, the seminal bad drawing application, the world must say goodbye to another ancient piece of that we're all still using for some reason: Adobe Flash.

In a press release on Monday, July 25th, Adobe, the makers of Flash, wrote that they would be discontinuing the multimedia software behind such time-wasters as Farmville, Crimson Room and waiting for Flash to update. The statement read:

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.

Over the next few years, software and web developers must start migrating towards other solutions. Microsoft announced that they will begin phasing Flash out on Edge and Internet Explorer over the next three years, eventually discontinuing support entirely. Google will be doing the same on Chrome. Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari will continue to support the software until the end of 2020, however, they will give users the opportunity what websites run it.

What Adobe said: No more Flash after 2020.
What Fortune 500 IT hears: We're good until at least 2030! https://t.co/rRkpzSRDvi

— Kenn White (@kennwhite) July 25, 2017

"Planning to end-of-life" is among the most chilling ways to say "stop updating." However, for a piece of multimedia software that's been around for over 20 years, it's not that bad. Flash, after all, has had a stay of execution since the adoption en masse of HTML5.

HTML5 has been Flash's biggest hurdle since it was adopted on the iPhone and other smartphone devices. Way back in 2010, Steve Jobs, the late founder and CEO of Apple, announced that Flash would never come to the iPhone because it was just too memory intensive. It was widely thought that this would be the Flash killer.

Still, Flash hung in there for another seven years (and still has three more to go), which is surprising because it seems like most of the world hates this piece of software. Adobe instead decided to not release Flash for iOS and instead, embedded itself on website after website, frequently reminding you to update Flash. You have to respect its persistence.

It's better to burn out than fade away, which is what Flash seems to be doing. Still, R.I.P. Flash, you certainly wasted a lot of time showing us weird stuff on the internet.

Adobe Flash will be discontinued in 2020, but you'll still get prompted to update it every 4 days through 2073.

— 👻✊Seth-sy MFer👻✊ (@SethFromThe716) July 25, 2017