Adobe Flash has been used to create some of the best content on the web for decades, and their Flash Player has been downloaded billions of times over the years. But that is about to come to an end.
Hackers have been finding and exploiting security holes in Flash faster than Adobe can patch them, and that has led many of us who follow these things to recommend disabling Flash on your computers in order to avoid malware attacks.
There was a time when Flash was pretty much required if you wanted to do much of anything on the Internet, but HTML5 and other modern technologies have now made it all but obsolete.
It appears that Adobe has finally realized that Flash has no viable future, as evidenced by this blog post on the Adobe website.
In that post Adobe is actively encouraging developers to ditch Flash and use other content creation tools instead, including their own Animate CC platform. Animate CC will continue to support Flash, but Adobe is downplaying the software’s Flash capabilities and promoting its use to create content using HTML5.
Here is the most interesting quote from the blog post:
Looking ahead, we encourage content creators to build with new web standards and will continue to focus on providing the best tools and services for designers and developers to create amazing content for the web.
Adobe will undoubtedly save a ton of cash when they can finally put the last nail in Flash’s coffin and stop paying out the nose just to fix all the new security holes that keep popping up.
And even more important, they’ll be able stop having to mitigate the damage done to the company’s good name every time a new security vulnerability in Flash rears its ugly head.
Hats off to Adobe for finally seeing the light and taking steps to give Flash the boot.