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'Adobe Flash Is Actually Going to Die' In 194 Days (gizmodo.com) 106

Posted by EditorDavid from the final-countdown dept.
An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo: Three years ago, long after the rise (and fall) of Flash, Adobe announced that its once-ubiquitous multimedia platform was finally going away. But Adobe never provided a specific date for when Flash would reach its end-of-life. Now we know: Adobe Flash is going to officially die on December 31, 2020.

While younger folks should be forgiven for not knowing about Flash, during the late 90s, and into the 2000s, huge swaths of the internet relied on Flash to add interactivity to websites in the form of animations, games, and even videos... While Flash won't just vanish into thin air on December 31, Adobe says that it will stop distributing and updating Flash. Critically, that also means Flash won't be getting any further security or privacy patches.

For a software platform that lasted more than two decades and played a huge part in the Dot-com bubble of the late 90s and early 2000s, Flash lasted a lot longer than most people probably ever expected. So pour one out for the software that brought us wonderful time-wasters like YTMND and Homestar Runner. It's been real, but it's time to go.
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'Adobe Flash Is Actually Going to Die' In 194 Days More

'Adobe Flash Is Actually Going to Die' In 194 Days

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  • Why wait 194 days?

  • That's what you think... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Saturday June 20, 2020 @10:43AM (#60205630)
    Adobe Flash Is Actually Going to Die' In 194 Days ... After Which it Will Haunt you From Beyond the Grave .... MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

    • Re:That's what you think... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Joe2020 ( 6760092 ) on Saturday June 20, 2020 @10:57AM (#60205670)

      I must be living in the past apparently, because I thought it died years ago and has been haunting us ever since.

      • Re:That's what you think... (Score:4, Funny)

        by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Saturday June 20, 2020 @11:37AM (#60205796)

        I must be living in the past apparently, because I thought it died years ago and has been haunting us ever since.

        You are confusing the living dead and the completely dead.

        • So you believe it's going to be completely dead?

          • So you believe it's going to be completely dead?

            Unfortunately no. It’s mostly dead but it’s going to come back for true love. The love of money by malware makers. I still get the occasional fake ads that I need to update my Flash installation.

          • So you believe it's going to be completely dead?

            I just figured it is kind of a zombie. If they are going to publicly behead Adobe Flash in 194 days and burn the corpse I'll be there with popcorn, pizza and beer. I positively loathe Adobe, its business practices and its entire product line.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rufty ( 37223 )

        Nope, not dead. Just smells that way.

    • It will continue to live on (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Saturday June 20, 2020 @01:11PM (#60206086)
      Flash was originally created as an animation tool. Way back in the days of dialup Internet, when bandwidth was at a premium. It allowed you to create reduced-size animation by doing tricks like animating bitmaps over a background [youtube.com] instead of encoding the entire thing as raw video. It's been used for that purpose to create many of the TV shows [wikipedia.org] and movies [wikipedia.org] you probably grew up with. Still is. Still will be, even if Adobe is no longer supporting it.

      Flash only became the de facto web standard for scripting because the W3C dragged its feet adding that capability to the HTML standard. A bunch of purists on the W3C had sticks up their asses and staunchly opposed any attempts to add scripting or in-line multimedia to the HTML standard, even though those were the things web designers wanted most. It took them over a decade to relent and release HTML 5 [wikipedia.org]. In that vacuum, web designers looked for anything that would give them what they wanted. We almost ended up with Microsoft ASP (which would've required any web server wanting to support it to buy a Windows Server license). It also contributed to the rise to prominence of PHP - probably the most awful programming language there is. Even the creators admit that it's more a hodgepodge of random pieces glued together, rather than a language designed from the ground up in a consistent and intelligent manner.

      Web designers eventually settled on Flash to give them the functionality they wanted. That's why it's so full of security holes. Flash was designed to be an animation tool, not a web standard. Its creators never considered all sorts of security concerns, because they never imagined it being used in a way where those security concerns would ever become an issue. So it may fade away from the web, but it will continue to live on for some time in the animation community. Hopefully doing only what it was originally intended to do, so it can't do harm anymore. If there's a lesson to be drawn from the whole Flash debacle, it's to give the people what they want, not to try to force your vision of how things should be onto the people. (Advice the Democratic party leadership could've used in 2016.)

      • Good summary of the last 20+ years! Don't forget Perl too. I got in to Perl in 2000 when I wanted to send email from a ASP web server (IIS) and discovered that I would need to pay a lot more for that extra functionality. A 25 line Perl script did the job. 25 lines as it had to establish its own port 25 tcp socket and send mail directly using SMTP dialogue. For me as a young developer it was eye-opening and I never used ASP to build anything again to any serious degree.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by flink ( 18449 )

          As someone who had to implement an SMTP client in VB6 to send mail from an ASP web server in 1998, I salute you.

      • There was a very long period of time where the only meaningful indie game platforms were either Flash, or asking people to download and run an executable on your computer. In the face of that I have to ask, why the hell does Flash never get any credit for IMPROVING security in a lot of cases?
        • In retrospect I think I worded that badly. I to specify that we didn't always have platforms like Steam to vet said executables, not that here in the future we have abandoned the practice of installing games.

      • Flash always seemed to be in much higher demand by web advertisers than by web designers as a whole.

      • To be even more specific, Macromedia designed much of flash (as well as other tools like authorware) really for interactive teaching and learning applications (IE, their target consumer was teachers, presenters and other power point types), for people that didn't really want to learn a language to build an interactive presentation or quiz. It got hijacked by the web because of the reasons you stated.

        PHP was awful pre-7.1, its actually a lot better now that they included a lot more oop aligned things, and I

  • Always a few years away but never quite arrives. I wonder which will happen first ?

  • Wow (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Finally a good thing about this year

  • It just became part of the various forms of what became the WhatWG HTML5 OS ("browsers"), where it became even bigger, more complex, more insane, and interfaced much deeper into the system, while keeping the same core ideological problems.

    And I'm not talking about the JS emulations.

    Flash coders would not even have dared to dream of running a full Unreal Engine, an entire Linux system with networking and everything, or even Windows inside the browser! ^^

  • Woo Hooo!

  • It's been real, but it's time to go.

    It was time to go ten years ago. Flash has been the old, grumpy grandfather everyone is always surprised to see at the family dinners and whisper "he's still alive?" behind his back.

    Maybe one day Javascript will join it in the well-deserved grave...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      More like the barmy old uncle kept in the attic who would periodically break free and pee on your rose bushes.

  • its lingering rotting smouldering corpse will be with us for another 3-5 years. People will forget that they have it installed but it will still be there providing an attack vector for hackers.
    I cam upon a web site only a few months ago that was 100% flash. Sad.
    Adobe should have nuked it years ago.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      Adobe should have been nuked years ago.

      FTFY

      I had a '68 Trophy 500 years ago, loved that bike. Went to India recently and was pleasantly surprised to find that they still make the Royal Enfield there, and it looks and sounds like the perfect Brit bike. Now I want one.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Teun ( 17872 )
        Did them Indians fix the oil leaks?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          Modern manufacturing methods produce much tighter tolerances in parts and gaskets are an order of magnitude better today, so they didn't necessarily fix them, the evolution of manufacturing did. That's why newer Harleys don't mark their territory like they used to, as well.

    • It's partly the incompetence of Adobe that Flash eventually had to die away. Flash gave us the first viable streaming video, the first interactive video applications and a lot more. If they had built it out to a viable "VM of the Internet" and opened it up for others, it could've been much more than just the stop-gap solution between HTML 5 and modern JavaScript environments. Unfortunately, Adobe seemed to be unable to recognize its full potential and left it to rot. It took them years to come up with a 64

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by zephvark ( 1812804 )

        It's entirely the incompetence of Adobe that Flash has to die.

        The original mess of code was written by a couple of guys who barely understood programming. They still had some concept of what their own code did (badly) but, when they left, no one else was ever able to untangle their unholy creation.

        Adobe still kept trying that, with year after year of trying to patch the gruesome and grotesque creation. Nobody could. It should have been rewritten from scratch. It was not. They just kept expanding their wretc

        • The original mess of code was written by a couple of guys who barely understood programming. They still had some concept of what their own code did (badly) but, when they left, no one else was ever able to untangle their unholy creation.

          That happened to a lot of different projects written in the 90s. The programmers started their career trying to save every single byte (which could still be important in the 90s), but never quite figured out how to make it readable (some programmers could, but that skill was rare).

          So in the 2010s when those programmers were retiring (hopefully rich from all the Adobe or Microsoft stock), the new kids who replaced them had a totally different mindset to programming. They don't understand why you would eve

      • Still can't do cross platform video conferencing/recording as you could with Flash.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday June 20, 2020 @11:31AM (#60205784)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • The education sector has lots of flash-dependent websites.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Falos ( 2905315 )

        This is the real problem. Lots of "lol flash needs to die" and "adobe just needs to QUIT" but it keeps getting strung along because content keeps getting written.

        The correct squawk for "omg no way" would be at the places still creating in flash.

        But I suppose they're pitching to suits and contract-granters and check-signers who don't know better. Even though they know it. I guess it's economic milking of people who will cobble it cheap. A skillset that's stringing out work that can still be pulled off in les

      • And it really pisses me off when I try to use the interactive portions of educational sites on my phone but I can't because "This requires Flash". Funny thing is, I have come across sites that were a mixture of proper HTM5 and Javascript, and legacy Flash garbage.

        Sure I could just crack open my laptop, but it's very inconvienent, and I downright should not have too. There is nothing that was done in Flash that could not be done in H5/Java.

      • Web sites that use flash are not a problem - They can be rewritten using a more standardized and modern interface. The real problem is flash embedded into the firmware of devices that are no longer being updated like: HVAC controls, Elevator controls, Security systems, Network appliances, etc. The hardware in these cases is of a sizable investment, and the manufacturer doesn't provide just updates to the control systems... You would need to replace ALL of it. That's what's going to require the use of IE 5.5

  • Some corporation will likely pay to keep it around. Just like how the UK National Health Service STILL keeps Windows XP around on life support. The same NHS that wonâ(TM)t keep humans around on life support.

  • From the document you linked to: " Adobe will be removing Flash Player download pages from its site and Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date."

    • What is the point of the standalone Adobe Flash Player if it won't play flash files? And why hasn't anyone rewritten Gemcraft Labyrinth in HTML5? I might have to set up an airgapped machine just for playing that.

      BUT MUH BOTNETS! MUH SECURITIES!

      (slowly) Air. Gapped.

  • Better than Real Audio (Score:4, Insightful)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Saturday June 20, 2020 @11:12AM (#60205738) Homepage Journal

    At least Flash did a great service by killing Real Audio and Real Video.

    • You just brought back some nightmares for me. :(

    • You, I like.

      Hober was vital to me and its benchmark of commercial viability a heartbreaking scenario. I'm referring to their adoption of Real Inc. and transitioning to iTunes.

      Witnessing the informational value of the Internet plummet to 0 Kelvin from a desktop is like owning zeppelins to witness robber barons reducing the sea to shipping lanes. But didn't Stephenson cover that metaphor already?
  • I wouldn't be looking forward to counting them, but there sure are a lot.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday June 20, 2020 @11:36AM (#60205794)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by JackAxe ( 689361 )
      This is what happens when famous people sway the masses based on half-truths. People don't think these things through and in some cases are nothing but hypocrites. Flash is easily blockable, I still have to point that out to people. And its worse offenses -- because anything popular gets abused, have nothing on the rampant abuses we all encounter daily. Some of the same developers that shit all over Flash, because their lord and savior Steve Jobs made it a crusade, are the biggest abusers of web bloat a

    • Way back in the day, I used a simple batch file to toggle it by renaming the executable.

      If for some reason I needed Flash, I just opened up a command prompt and typed "flash". A little kludgy, but it worked very well and simple.

    • I would really like to block those stupid cookie warning boxes, and that overlay shit that covers the entire browsing window.

      Yes, there are some half assed extentions for desktop browsers to do that, but if you are on mobile, you are SOL.

    • Another nice thing is that it is/was single process. Massive CPU consumption with Flash was only an issue when single-core CPUs were around. Now, the few remaining Flash sites run better than any "HTML5" page I come across.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      So it was all or nothing. Which meant trouble because some idiot could put up a site completely in flash and that was it.

      I'll take today's greater control over having all or nothing. That's like saying the only way I could get to the store from my house is taking a semi or not going at all.

      Yes, blocking video is hard, because it turns out there are lots of ways to play a video. Though oddly, browser makers can easily override this - the browser is, after all, responsible for telling the media player framewo

  • Steve Jobs can now RIP. I remember when he wrote his "Thoughts on Flash" open letter. At the time, it was mostly just some developers who really knew about the problems with Flash, but beyond that people either didn't know about Flash or saw it as a somewhat good thing since it powered so much content. His letter was in self-interest, but it accelerated the demise of Flash, so I'm grateful for it.

  • Internet Explorer outlasted flash.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thsths ( 31372 )

      Maybe by a bit, but it is obsolete now, and replaced by Edge. Edge is actually not bad, especially now that it is Chromium based and supports real extensions.

  • We need a new flag day [slashdot.org]. I suggest we make December 31, 2020 the great legacy switch off day where as well as Flash, we switch off Internet Explorer support, IPv4, The remaining server 2003/8 boxes and Slashdot switches to unicode.

  • Known Since July 2017 (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheCowSaysMoo ( 4915561 ) on Saturday June 20, 2020 @11:49AM (#60205822)

    But Adobe never provided a specific date for when Flash would reach its end-of-life. Now we know: Adobe Flash is going to officially die on December 31, 2020.

    Looks like Gizmodo was hard-up for another Adobe Flash story. Shocker, I know.

    The original Adobe blog post [1], which is linked from the Adobe EOL page, stated (bolding by me): "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."

    "Specifically... end of 2020" sounds an awful lot like Dec 31, 2020... which is why everybody talking about this since 2017 has used that date as the EOL date.

    Even the EOL page [2] linked from Gizmodo states (bolding by me), "As previously announced in July 2017, Adobe will stop distributing and updating Flash Player after December 31, 2020 (“EOL Date”)."

    [1] https://theblog.adobe.com/adob... [adobe.com]
    [2] https://www.adobe.com/products... [adobe.com]

  • Adobe posted a notice on its Web site on 25 July 2017 -- almost three years ago -- that stated:
    > we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020
    That should have been sufficient warning to Web developers to update their sites.

    I normally browse with Flash Block enabled. It has been a long time since I had to disable Flash Block to view a Web page.

    My records go back only to 2015. Since then, I have installed new versions of Flash every 27 days. Most have been to correct securit

    • [A warning in July 2017] should have been sufficient warning to Web developers to update their sites.

      How would a site like Newgrounds go about preserving the Flash works uploaded by its users, particularly by authors who have since died or otherwise became uncontactable?

  • It's a shame. Really. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Saturday June 20, 2020 @12:22PM (#60205896)

    Flash/AS2 was the best platform independent rich client technology ever, hands down. 15 years ahead of it's time at least.

    The only thing that finally comes close these days is Flutter & Dart.

    I did professional rich client development in flash/as for a living in the zero years. Back in 2001 I built a asynchronous streaming multi media client that did all the work on the client-side, with audio, video and all. This was roughly 5 years before YouTube, when channel bundled ISDN with 128kbit was the best a regular person could get.

    The culprit is known: Adobe fucked it up, big time.

    Flash would have been the perfect IDE for resolution independent screen content on the mobile high-res displays. I remember running that old rich media client on flash on my Android 4 HTC desire smartphone. It ran without a hitch and blew our competition out of the water.

    However, Adobe was too complacent and frankly too incompetent to get this right.

    These days we have to fiddle with some convoluted VDOM bloat, Java style. React, angular, Vue ... All are a total POS compared to flash. Bazillion libs and tools and no where near the performance or elegance of a flash application.

    It's a real shame.

    My 2 cents.

    • Flash sucks, go ask any VMware admin that is forced to use vCenter. Even on 6.7 the flash clinet can do somethings the HTML5 client can't, the HTML5 clinet was ALMOST feature complete. Compared to the viClient(win32 app) the web apps suck, has a ton of latency and are not compact on screen for menu's and space use.

      Flash really slowed down the web browser and machine as well, it would frequently crash and we would have to re-load or re-login. The legacy viClient that was win32 never had any of those issue

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by daFist ( 322810 )

      This is spot on hands down, I too developed in flash in the zero years and it was complex enough, great animation, better than Javascript, and you could do communicate with the browsers, connect to a rest server. I worked on a small team and built the e-learning CD for the Biology Audesirk book by Prentice Hall. If you have every played Behemoth's games like Castle Crashers or Alien Hominid the graphics were made in Flash (in fact Alien Hominid started as a game from their portal newgrounds.com, written in

      • If done right, Flash could have been completely fucking awesome. I played quite a few Flash games, and I still use an offline Flash player to play some of the Super Mario fangames that are almost on par with the SNES in terms of quality.

        Too bad company politics seem to more often than not get in the way. :\

    • I was going to write a post disagreeing with you saying Flash was good, but

      These days we have to fiddle with some convoluted VDOM bloat, Java style. React, angular, Vue ... All are a total POS compared to flash.

      Yeah, that's basically true.

    • Flash was (almost) what Java applets could have been. In any case, creating Flash apps was fairly easy. The documentation was decent and one could do things without using complex libraries that are hard to understand. Of course, it did have its shortcomings but compared to the rest I liked it better. Finally, it is less bloated than HTML5 and had faster motion animation last time I checked. R.I.P.

  • Damn, Losing All Your Base... (Score:3)

    by OtisSnerd ( 600854 ) on Saturday June 20, 2020 @12:40PM (#60205950)
    When Flash dies, how will I get my "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" fix, the one with the "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" sound track?

    https://www.allyourbasearebelo... [allyourbas...ngtous.com]
  • I had a service call just last week. Client couldn't get in to his online auto auction because it required Flash. There are many online apps still out there using Flash. I guess they haven't gotten the memo.
  • I hope Adobe provides an official way to download the final version as an offline installer. Without an offline installer, it won't be possible to reinstall old systems that rely on flash. Upgrading old systems is not always an option.

    • Indeed. People have been so hyped over the death of Flash, the general attitude is that 20+ years of web content can just die in a fire, too. All this charade has done is prove how poor a job the standards compliant technologies have done in trying to keep up with Flash. If you can't beat 'em... kill 'em.

      I'm an artist, and I still know lots of people who love to make interactive animations in Flash, and there still is absolutely no alternative. I'm really pissed that, for the most part, nobody gives a d

  • So what will happen to Adobe Connect, which is still based on Flash? At the moment, it comes with a "desktop app", which is basically a Flash browser just for Adobe Connect. Maybe Flash will survive after all?

  • The security wonk in my head is ecstatic to see flash die. The archivist in me bemoans that a huge part of the adolescent internet is going to die.

    The security wonk is winning. I suspect that some clever folks are already working on an emulator to settle down the archivist issues.

  • Apple's decision not to support Flash in the iPad and iPhone started Flash's demise and the rise of HTML5/JavaScript.
    • Yeah, sure.... only it took another 10 years, and Microsoft to say they were going to be slowly removing Flash in 2017 by 2020 did Adobe declare they were killing flash. Yeah... was totally apple there that did it....

  • Flash will live on as long as it's installed somewhere.

  • Just going to add it to the list now.

  • Wow, homestar runner. So much time wasted, but fun times. Also not mentioned here, but fat.com (I think was the domain name, "behind the scenes of music that sucks") when it was a thing was another great time waster.

    I both loved and hated flash, but I'll raise a drink to some of it's creations.

  • It's bad enough that I have a bunch of legacy (Cisco! )equipment that needs java 1.6 to function. There's a whole slew of stuff (I'm looking at you Netapp!) that has flash embedded and requires it in order to configure/use said device. I mean, I'm glad it's going away, but I'm upset that I need to keep a windows 95 VM hanging around just so I can manage some older equipment that has not reached it's end of life yet. (Yes, Netapp, I *know* I can buy a new SAN that doesn't rely on flash to configure it, but I
  • I've grown pretty attached to it over the years...

  • Like everyone else who had to support flash apps, I'm ecstatic that flash is going away.

    Except it isn't. Flash based apps on the net will still be around. Some mission critical stuff, even, because certain corporations never got around to rewriting the code because hey, flash is still here.

    For flash to really truly go away, it has to Stop Working, completely, with no recourse. And then we'll have to go through a period where some apps aren't available, until they're rewritten or (better yet) the companie

  • on June 10, 2020.

    Version 32.0.0.387

  • There are still a few of them using it! :(

  • If they kill Flash, how will we ever know what is coming at zombo.com????

    The people demand to know!

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