Adobe announces Flash EOL date

[Arthur]

2020 can't come soon enough!

 

https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html

 

Adobe has long played a leadership role in advancing interactivity and creative content – from video, to games and more – on the web. Where we’ve seen a need to push content and interactivity forward, we’ve innovated to meet those needs. Where a format didn’t exist, we invented one – such as with Flash and Shockwave. And over time, as the web evolved, these new formats were adopted by the community, in some cases formed the basis for open standards, and became an essential part of the web.

 

But as open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the web. Over time, we’ve seen helper apps evolve to become plugins, and more recently, have seen many of these plugin capabilities get incorporated into open web standards. Today, most browser vendors are integrating capabilities once provided by plugins directly into browsers and deprecating plugins.

 

Given this progress, and 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.

 

Several industries and businesses have been built around Flash technology – including gaming, education and video – and we remain committed to supporting Flash through 2020, as customers and partners put their migration plans into place. Adobe will continue to support Flash on a number of major OSs and browsers that currently support Flash content through the planned EOL. This will include issuing regular security patches, maintaining OS and browser compatibility and adding features and capabilities as needed. We remain fully committed to working with partners, including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla to maintain the security and compatibility of Flash content. [To see each partner’s announcement on this news, click on the links inside each partner name.] In addition, we plan to move more aggressively to EOL Flash in certain geographies where unlicensed and outdated versions of Flash Player are being distributed.

 

Adobe will also remain at the forefront of leading the development of new web standards and actively participate in their advancement. This includes continuing to contribute to the HTML5 standard and participating in the WebAssembly Community Group. And we’ll continue to provide best in class animation and video tools such as Animate CC, the premier web animation tool for developing HTML5 content, and Premiere Pro CC.

 

Looking ahead, Adobe will continue to provide the best tools and services for designers and developers to create amazing content for the web.

Edited July 25, 2017 by Arthur

[Arthur]

The End of an Era – Next Steps for Adobe Flash

 

We will phase out Flash from Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer, culminating in the removal of Flash from Windows entirely by the end of 2020. This process began already for Microsoft Edge with Click-to-Run for Flash in the Windows 10 Creators Update. The process will continue in the following phases:

 

• Through the end of 2017 and into 2018, Microsoft Edge will continue to ask users for permission to run Flash on most sites the first time the site is visited, and will remember the user’s preference on subsequent visits. Internet Explorer will continue to allow Flash with no special permissions required during this time.
  
• In mid to late 2018, we will update Microsoft Edge to require permission for Flash to be run each session. Internet Explorer will continue to allow Flash for all sites in 2018.
  
• In mid to late 2019, we will disable Flash by default in both Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer. Users will be able to re-enable Flash in both browsers. When re-enabled, Microsoft Edge will continue to require approval for Flash on a site-by-site basis.
  
• By the end of 2020, we will remove the ability to run Adobe Flash in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer across all supported versions of Microsoft Windows. Users will no longer have any ability to enable or run Flash.
  

This timeline is consistent across browsers, including Google, Mozilla, and Apple. We look forward to continuing our close collaboration with Adobe, other browser vendors, and the publishing community, as we evolve the future of the web for everyone.

 

Saying goodbye to Flash in Chrome

 

Today, Adobe announced its plans to stop supporting Flash at the end of 2020.

 

For 20 years, Flash has helped shape the way that you play games, watch videos and run applications on the web. But over the last few years, Flash has become less common. 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.

 

These open web technologies became the default experience for Chrome late last year when sites started needing to ask your permission to run Flash. Chrome will continue phasing out Flash over the next few years, first by asking for your permission to run Flash in more situations, and eventually disabling it by default. We will remove Flash completely from Chrome toward the end of 2020.

 

If you regularly visit a site that uses Flash today, you may be wondering how this affects you. If the site migrates to open web standards, you shouldn’t notice much difference except that you'll no longer see prompts to run Flash on that site. If the site continues to use Flash, and you give the site permission to run Flash, it will work through the end of 2020.

 

It’s taken a lot of close work with Adobe, other browsers, and major publishers to make sure the web is ready to be Flash-free. We’re supportive of Adobe’s announcement today, and we look forward to working with everyone to make the web even better.

 

Firefox Roadmap for Flash End-of-Life

 

This year, Firefox will become the fastest it has ever been. Reducing Flash usage now is an important part of making the web and Firefox better together, and will support the end of Flash in 2019 and 2020. The security and privacy features users have come to expect, combined with a new interface and added functionality, will streamline and modernize the browser experience for Firefox users.

 

Adobe Announces Flash Distribution and Updates to End

 

Adobe has announced it will stop distributing and updating Flash Player at the end of 2020 and is encouraging web developers to migrate any existing Flash content to open standards. Apple is working with Adobe, industry partners, and developers to complete this transition.

 

Apple users have been experiencing the web without Flash for some time. iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch never supported Flash. For the Mac, the transition from Flash began in 2010 when Flash was no longer pre-installed. Today, if users install Flash, it remains off by default. Safari requires explicit approval on each website before running the Flash plugin.

 

To display rich interactive content in the browser, WebKit—the engine that powers Safari—supports the latest standards, including the following:

 

• HTML Video and Media Source Extensions support a wide range of video experiences, including short clips, longer content, and live streaming.
  
• HTML Canvas and WebGL provide fast, dynamic graphics for games and interactive experiences.
  
• CSS Transitions and Animations add polished animations to web interfaces.
  
• WebRTC enables real-time peer-to-peer video.
  
• WebAssembly allows games and other compute-intensive applications to run faster.
  

The WebKit Project is excited about the future of the open web. We invite you to follow this blog to learn about new technologies as they’re implemented in WebKit.

 

http://blog.chromium.org/2017/07/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-flash.html

 

Three years ago, over 80% of Chrome daily desktop users visited sites with Flash. Today only 17% of users visit sites with Flash and we’re continuing to see a downward trend as sites move to HTML.

 

Edited July 25, 2017 by Arthur

[localzuk]

And all across the land, IT techs rejoice!

[Arthur]

Now that there is a definitive EOL date how likely is it that MyMaths & Co. will ditch Flash before 2020? 🤔

 

And all across the land, IT techs rejoice!

What are we going to do with all of the time freed up from not having to constantly keep Flash Player up-to-date? 🙂

[LeMarchand]

:whoo::whoo::whoo::whoo::whoo:

 

Hopefully all those poorly coded EDU site will either close or be forced to rewrite their code. Three and a half years to go...

[Norphy]

:whoo::whoo::whoo::whoo::whoo:

 

Hopefully all those poorly coded EDU site will either close or be forced to rewrite their code. Three and a half years to go...

 

You KNOW they won't! I wonder how long it'll be before someone releases a standalone Flash browser for refuseniks who won't change their software? There will be a lot of them.

[fredbayker]

Why so long? The timeline should've been shorter. Only to shame lazy developers if not anything else.

[jmak]

Now that there is a definitive EOL date how likely is it that MyMaths & Co. will ditch Flash before 2020? 🤔

 

 

What are we going to do with all of the time freed up from not having to constantly keep Flash Player up-to-date? 🙂

Focus in on those Java updates 😂

[mavhc]

Should be easy enough to compile flash player for webassembly

[Sylv3r]

Now that there is a definitive EOL date how likely is it that MyMaths & Co. will ditch Flash before 2020?

 

I've had a few salesy update e-mails from MyMaths recently with regards to changing over to Flash - I know it's been on the cards for a while, but I think we are nearly there !

[free780]

BTL better move away from Flash Player.

 

http://www.btl.com/surpass/secureassess/

[Katy]

Hooray, but now we have to prepare for the daily "No you can't use this, you bought the software 50 years ago and the system it uses no longer exists." then being personally blamed for the fact that the software they bought is crap and the fact that Adobe have killed off Flash...

[localzuk]

Focus in on those Java updates 

Java only goes on a handful of machines here now - most people don't need it!

[DGardiner]

and i bet some of the web based education software places will still not move on...

[Tefters]

Now that there is a definitive EOL date how likely is it that MyMaths & Co. will ditch Flash before 2020? [emoji848]

 

 

What are we going to do with all of the time freed up from not having to constantly keep Flash Player up-to-date? [emoji846]

 

MyMaths has a lot of work ahead of them now! Mwahaha

[3s-gtech]

Linguascope got onto this one, fair play - don't think they're 100% Flash converted but getting there.

[mavhc]

Of course the latest version of Flash, I mean Adobe Animate, exports as html5, so it's really not too much work

[Arthur]

it's really not too much work

That depends on the source file...

 

What to expect when converting Flash to HTML5 « Adobe Creative Cloud Blog

 

Animation is really quite straightforward. What gets tricky is when there is some sort of interactivity involved – especially if there is a lot of ActionScript code. I’m a believer in recognizing the original purpose of a thing and making intentional decisions based upon considerate thought and future projection in light of past experience. Does the project in question, assuming it has some age behind it, fulfill its original purpose – even today? If the answer is “yes” – then we don’t need to really do much of anything. If the answer is “no” – then a decision must be made on whether to convert the project, rewrite it entirely, or kill it outright.

 

What type of projects are easy to convert?

Just about all animation (timelines, tweens) and assets within a document that was previously targeting Flash Player should convert almost perfectly with the exception of certain unsupported filters and effects, differences in how text may be handled, and so forth. Additionally, content such as web-based ads or basic infographics will convert wonderfully – though if there is interaction involved, the ActionScript code must be converted to JavaScript in order to target the native web. Thankfully, the code for basic interaction is very similar between the two languages and Animate CC even comes with a variety of code snippets you can use to wire up common tasks with ease.

 

When converting Flash to HTML5 should the user expect everything to convert or should they expect to do some clean up of the code?

Any ActionScript code that is present will by necessity have to be converted to JavaScript to run in the native web. Fortunately, for most projects, this is something that can be done fairly easily if you have an understanding or either language as both JavaScript and ActionScript are both dialects of the ECMAScript language specification. Most interactive content can be handled in this way.

 

There do, of course, exist other projects which are not ideal for conversion. For instance, I’ve written a number of incredibly video-centric applications targeting Flash Player which make use of RTMP video streaming protocols and additional APIs that exist on Adobe Media Server or something that relies upon BlazeDS data transfer protocols and methods. Functionality such as this is so reliant upon these other servers and services – and differs so wildly from what is pobble or manageable on alternate platforms that a simple conversion in Animate CC simply won’t cut it. The assets and user interface would convert just fine but we’d have to then explore additional technologies to augment what we are left with after the conversion process. While I’m sure there are many 3rd party libraries and additional servers that exist for performing similar functionality… this scenario would basically include a full-scale rewrite of the project. Luckily – most projects out there are no where near this level of complexity!

 

Additionally, much Flash content exists which is built upon the Apache Flex (formerly Adobe Flex) framework. Flex takes a different approach to design in that it is a platform which can combine MXML and visual content produced in Animate CC with ActionScript 3.0 within an external development environment like Flash Builder, JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA, or even Visual Studio Code from Microsoft. Since Flex projects are not based within Animate CC documents, the normal document conversion mechanisms present within Animate CC spoken of previously do not apply. However, contributors at Apache Flex have been building an alternate version of Flex branded as “FlexJS” which exists to solve this same problem. With FlexJS, you can write your content using MXML and ActionScript 3.0 and when ready, compile it to target both Flash Player and the native web browser through a process which converts the code into standard web technologies as HTML and JavaScript (very similar to how TypeScript is converted to JavaScript in Angular projects).

[Arthur]

AIR Roadmap Update

 

With the news today regarding Flash Player, I'm sure many of you have questions regarding AIR and its future roadmap. Let me start by saying that today's announcement was not about AIR, and instead focuses entirely on Flash Player and the browser plugin environment.Adobe remains committed to AIR and we believe it continues to be a great desktop and mobile development platform.

 

Many of you have asked for a roadmap update. We hope to have our official Flash Runtime roadmap updated soon, but until then I wanted to share some of the features we'd like to accomplish in our upcoming releases. As always, this list may change as we receive feedback from the community.

[Arthur]

Adobe Connect On Web Conferencing, Open Standards, and the End of the Flash Player

 

Adobe and Macromedia provided innovation to the web, through browser plug-ins, before the underlying web standards could support the interactivity and creativity our digital media publishers and consumers craved. By the end of 2020, we firmly believe that all of theses required media capabilities and standards will be widely deployed and natively available to customers within browsers.

 

That being said, there is still uncertainty on the timeline for when these open web standards will mature to the point where they can support the one-to-many real time communication with video and voice that is central to Adobe Connect users’ everyday workflow.

 

In order to navigate the sea change currently at hand, we are releasing Adobe Connect 9.7, which will offer users a standalone executable desktop application completely independent from the Flash Player in the browser. We are also pursuing the creation of a full-fledged web-application, currently being developed and tested in a private beta environment, that will take advantage of the rapidly evolving open standards of tomorrow.

 

This two-pronged approach will ensure users are able to enjoy the rich features of Adobe Connect with seamless entry to meeting rooms through the 9.7 desktop application while we simultaneously move the product, and the necessary underlying web standards, towards supporting browser-based web conferencing with full feature parity to today’s product.

[LeMarchand]

Adobe Flash Fans Want a Chance to Fix Its One Million Bugs Under an Open Source License | Gizmodo UK

 

Noooooooooo!!!

Edited July 27, 2017 by LeMarchand

[Roberto]

Adobe Flash Fans Want a Chance to Fix Its One Million Bugs Under an Open Source License | Gizmodo UK

 

Noooooooooo!!!

 

These people need to be found and stopped. Locked up in a cell with a faraday cage around it, if that’s what it takes.

[sted]

These people need to be found and stopped. Locked up in a cell with a faraday cage around it, if that’s what it takes.

you say that but like old console/computer games theres a good argument for preservation but only in a sandboxed environment.

[Arthur]

Flash's decline is going well!

 

Google Chrome: Flash Usage Declines from 80% in 2014 to Under 8% Today

 

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.

 

These statistics on Flash's declining numbers were shared with the public by Parisa Tabriz, Director of Engineering at Google, during a keynote speech at Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) held in San Diego last week.

 

Tabriz, one of the Google bigwigs in charge of Chrome's security, was giving a talk on the evolution of security features in Chrome and the web platform. Naturally, she mentioned Flash!

 

[...]

 

This big drop could, at least in theory, be explained by the fact that most advertising networks and video streaming portals have moved away from Flash to HTML5, meaning most people can go days before encountering a website that still loads some kind of Flash object.

 

Flash to be removed completely in Chrome 87

For Chrome, this means Chrome 87, expected to be released in December 2020, which is the industry-agreed cutoff date when Adobe will stop shipping updates and when other browsers also agreed to remove Flash from their stable branches as well.

 

But before Chrome 87, Chrome users will go through an intermediary step. In current versions of Chrome, Flash runs under a click-to-run policy. Starting with Chrome 76 —expected in July 2019— Flash will be disabled by default, meaning users will have to enable the plugin in their settings before even entering a click-to-run state.

[caffrey]

Shame that 8% are predominantly the education sites the majority of teachers use