Buh-Bye: Adobe End-Of-Lifes Flash For 2020

July 26, 2017 by Dave Haynes

Flash has been gradually disappearing out of digital signage platforms and playlists for several years, but the company behind the technology, Adobe, made it known yesterday it is formally end-of-lifing it by 2020.

Adobe said Tuesday it will stop updating and distributing its Flash Player at the end of 2020.

The company said on its blog:

Where we’ve seen a need to push content and interactivity forward, we’ve innovated to meet those needs. Where a format didn’t exist, we invented one – such as with Flash and Shockwave. And over time, as the web evolved, these new formats were adopted by the community, in some cases formed the basis for open standards, and became an essential part of the web.

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 AppleFacebookGoogleMicrosoft 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.

Several industries and businesses have been built around Flash technology – including gaming, education and video – and we remain committed to supporting Flash through 2020, as customers and partners put their migration plans into place. Adobe will continue to support Flash on a number of major OSs and browsers that currently support Flash content through the planned EOL. This will include issuing regular security patches, maintaining OS and browser compatibility and adding features and capabilities as needed. We remain fully committed to working with partners, including AppleFacebookGoogleMicrosoft and Mozilla to maintain the security and compatibility of Flash content. [To see each partner’s announcement on this news, click on the links inside each partner name.] In addition, we plan to move more aggressively to EOL Flash in certain geographies where unlicensed and outdated versions of Flash Player are being distributed.

 

Flash was VERY central to much of what digital signage was about for many years, as a mechanism to play out motion graphics and also as the front-end of some CMS platforms. But as the statement notes, it has been supplanted by newer, lighter and far less resource-intensive technologies.

There were also big legal questions about whether using the Flash player as a signage player met the requirements of the Adobe end-user license agreement.

I don’t come across Flash often these days, but it is still out there.

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