(CNET) The Flash Player has been there for you all along, inside your browser, making it possible for you to play online games, stream radio station music and watch YouTube videos. But after a two-decade run, Adobe is killing it off.
Countless nails have been hammered in Flash’s coffin in recent years, most notably by Apple’s Steve Jobs and also by Adobe itself. Now, though, there’s a date for the funeral: Dec. 31, 2020.
Flash has been a website workhorse — online gaming site Kongregate has more than 100,000 Flash games — but don’t fret over the demise of the pioneering software. It’s more appropriate to rejoice, since the software today is a security risk and major source of browser crashes.
“I am glad Adobe is ending Flash’s life. It has honestly made the web a worse place for more than a decade,” said Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin.
Indeed, Adobe’s move is momentous enough that the biggest names in web tech — Apple, Google, Facebook, Mozilla and Microsoft — coordinated announcements to tell us what’s going on and to reassure us all that it’s going to be fine. Read more
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