While some operating systems and browsers have already discontinued Flash, Adobe (ADBE) announced its plan to discontinue support for Flash three years ago - and the program’s “end-of-life” day finally came on December 31. In 2014, 80% of Google Chrome users visited a site with Flash code. The software was a notorious target for hackers and resulted in numerous high-profile security breaches.Īs HTML5 began to overtake Flash, usage dwindled.

A year later, Adobe said it would no longer develop the software on mobile devices.įlash Player remained a ubiquitous tool for desktop across multiple web browsers, with more than 1 billion users just a decade ago, making it a particularly useful vulnerability for hackers to exploit. In 2010, he penned a scathing open letter about the software, saying iPhones and iPads would never support Flash, which for years was plagued with bugs and security vulnerabilities. (AAPL) cofounder Steve Jobs refused to give in. When some iPhone users bemoaned the lack of Flash on their devices, rendering some websites unusable, Apple Open web standards like HTML5 made it possible to embed content directly onto webpages.Įven when it was still useful, it was far from universally loved. Although Flash played a crucial role in the early days of the Internet - it used to be, for example, the standard way YouTube played its videos - it has become obsolete. The writing has been on the wall for a long time. Adobe has officially killed off Flash Player, the buggy, hated, security vulnerability of a web browser plug-in that was once widely used for viewing rich content like games, videos and other media online.

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