In the wake of the recent end of Microsoft Paint, Adobe has announced it will discontinue support for Adobe Flash in 2020. Flash is one of the oldest, most widespread, and most dangerous programs out there.
In 1992, 25 years ago, the two software companies Macromind and Authorware joined forces in San Francisco, California.
The resulting company Macromedia brought Flash version 1 onto the market five years later.
Support for Adobe Flash ends in 2020
Whether the developers had known at that time that their software would endure for years the Internet and serving (and annoying) its users is unknown.
The software, which allows the programming and presentation of photo and video content has belonged to the technology group Adobe since 2005. For the acquisition of Macromedia, the Adobe executives spent $ 3.4 billion.
Now, Adobe has announced in a blog post that support for Adobe Flash will end in 2020. They will also stop distribution of the corresponding Flash Player.
The decision to discontinue the software was made after consultation with Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla. These companies all want to remove the last Flash relics from their systems by 2020.
Big safety risk and better alternatives
As a justification for the end of Adobe Flash, the group states that in recent years, new, open standards have grown with HTML 5, WebGL and Web Assembly. In the meantime, most of them offer many of the required functions on their own.
Extensions which previously had to be installed via plug-ins are now integrated into the browser. That’s why the biggest browsers some have been able to automatically block or stop Flash content for some time.
Although for Adobe, with the end of Adobe Flash, a profitable source of money will disappear in 2020, users can breathe a sigh of relief. Finally, it is out in the open that Adobe software is a major security risk.
In 2015 alone, programmers, businesses, and other sources discovered 313 critical vulnerabilities. Each of these represents a potential security risk for your computer.
The end of the Flash Player for Adobe also means the end of a hopeless struggle. For every fixed security gap, two new possibilities of attack sprang up.
