The End of Flash - MGR Blog

A few days ago, Adobe announced its plans to stop supporting Flash at the end of 2020.  I used to love Flash back in the days and it was our preferred format for video streaming.  Yet, as time went by and browsers, mobile devices and programming languages evolved, you could clearly see how Flash was just not the ideal solution anymore.

As Microsoft points out, “Flash led the way on the web for rich content, gaming, animations, and media of all kinds, and inspired many of the current web standards powering HTML5. Adobe has partnered with Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple, and many others, to ensure that the open web could meet and exceed the experiences that Flash has traditionally provided. HTML5 standards, implemented across all modern browsers, provide these capabilities with improved performance, battery life, and increased security. We look forward to continuing to work with Adobe and our industry partners on enriching the open web without the need for plug-ins.”

Google offers more insights as far as Flash usage for Chrome users. “Three years ago, 80 percent of desktop Chrome users visited a site with Flash each day. Today usage is only 17 percent and continues to decline.

This trend reveals that sites are migrating to open web technologies, which are faster and more power-efficient than Flash. They’re also more secure, so you can be safer while shopping, banking, or reading sensitive documents. They also work on both mobile and desktop, so you can visit your favorite site anywhere.”

Both, Microsoft and Chrome stopped running Flash by default last year and added the “permission window” asking you to run Flash.  By the same token, both have also announced that they will continue to phase it out over the next couple of years until 2020 when Flash will finally cease to exist and be fully removed from Chrome, Edge and Internet Explorer at that time.

The above timeline is also agreed upon by Mozilla and Apple as it has been set in collaboration with Adobe to ensure enough time for a smooth transition for both users and developers.

If you regularly visit websites that use Flash, you can expect those to be updated in the coming months.  Typically, users will not notice any difference other than, once they are updated, you will stop seeing the browser’s pop ups telling you to run or download Flash to view their content.  Again, at the end of 2020 either those site owners remove and replace all Flash content, or their visitors will just see an empty space where the Flash file used to be.

At MGR we stopped using Flash over a year ago as we already saw signs of this coming.  Our MGR WebBooks are built using HTML5 and so are all the animated banners or online videos that we create for our clients.  If you need any assistance converting any Flash content to HTML5, do not hesitate to contact anybody at our office.

Thank you for Reading.  Until next time, this is Manuel Gil del Real (MGR).

Read Adobe Announcement >

Read Microsoft Announcement >

Google/Chrome Announcement >