Adobe will end support for Flash when 2020 is over. ZDNet reports that Adobe will prompt you to uninstall Flash “later this year” if you don’t already know it’s time to leave the plugin behind. Adobe will stop offering downloads, the company has also warned that it will block Flash content from running in the player starting in 2021.
Flash is known to be a security nightmare, and allowing users to keep running it without support would invite attackers to discover and exploit vulnerabilities. Still, it’s rare to see any developer drop support so thoroughly that it won’t let you use the software and actively discourages use months in advance.
Adobe Flash Player was initially released in 1996 to allow users to view multimedia contents and stream audio and video on Internet Explorer and Firefox web browsers. Since web standards and back then were unable to execute rich Internet applications on their own, Adobe introduced Flash player.
Currently, according to web technology survey site W3Techs, only 2.6% of today’s websites utilize Flash code, a number that has plummeted from a 28.5% market share recorded at the start of 2011. Parisa Tabriz, Director of Engineering at Google, said the percentage of daily Chrome users who’ve loaded at least one page containing Flash content per day has gone down from around 80% in 2014 to under 8% in early 2018, a number that has most likely continued to go down in the meantime.
Downloading Adobe Flash player from unauthorized, third-party websites after December 31, 2020, is highly risky. As we have observed numerous instances in the past where attackers used outdated software downloads to spread malware and viruses.
