You can’t use a computer and not hear about Adobe Flash Player at some point. Created over 24 years ago, this computer software supports content on the Adobe Flash platform including multimedia content, audio and video streaming and rich Internet applications.

This made Adobe Flash Player an important tool for many years where over 400 million out of the 1 billion desktops in the world had the flash player installed. But over the years and as technologies evolved, the efficiency of the Flash Player has slowly died down that a lot of its users find it unnecessary for their computers. There are even a lot of Adobe alternatives in the market now.

So it wasn’t a complete shock when in July 2017, Adobe finally released a statement regarding the future of Adobe Flash Player: “In collaboration with several of our technology partners—including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash.

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.” Following this announcement, Microsoft also announced that a Windows Update would remove Adobe Flash Player from all browsers by December 31, 2020.

Is Flash Player still safe to use in 2020?

The question is; is Flash Player still safe to use this year? The answer is yes, but you have to do it with caution. Adobe may be discontinuing Flash Player by the end of the year, but it still continues to release updates to protect its users from vulnerabilities like viruses and hackers.

In fact, it just released version 32.0.0.321 last January 21, 2020. So if you want to continue using Adobe Flash Player, make sure that it’s updated regularly.

What is HTML5?

Adobe encouraged its users to migrate to HTML5 after Flash Player is discontinued. HTML5 is essentially the fifth generation markup language used by the World Wide Web. Converting to HTML5 would mean creating an action plan to make sure that everything will run smoothly.

This should include a thorough evaluation of all the apps and programs that use Adobe Flash Player to determine which you should retire and keep. Those published content that you choose to keep should be converted HTML5. Some apps may also be redesigned or rebuilt to be compatible with HTML5.

The bottomline

It may be the end of life for Adobe Flash Player, but we can definitely look forward to better things as new generation of technologies emerge on the market.

1 comment
  1. …What was the point of this article? It’s not actually adding any new info to what’s been known for years now, and completely ignores the *huge* and numerous security issues that have plagued Flash for as long as it’s existed. It’s a bit ridiculous to read the thousands of articles over the years about the mess that is Flash, and then suddenly to come upon an article like this pondering if Flash is safe or not. Is this for real?

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