Adobe wants its users to uninstall Flash Player from their PCs as the company announced that the software will reach its EOL (End-Of-Life) on Dec 31st of this year. The company announced this move in a new Flash Player EOL (End-Of-Life) support page. Adobe published this page earlier this month, and six months prior to the EOL date of Flash Player.
According to Adobe, once Flash Player has reached its EOL date, the company will not only stop providing updates for this software, but the company also plans to remove all download links of Flash Player from the company’s website. This step will prevent people from installing Flash Player and continuing to use an unmaintained version of the software.
Moreover, the company also said that after the End-Of-Life date, the company will block all Flash-based content from running in Adobe Flash Player. This indicates that the company plans to add or has added a ‘time bomb’ in the software code to avoid users from using Flash Player starting 2021.
These decisions are the most aggressive steps taken by a company to prevent its users from using the software after its End-Of-Life date. Adobe Flash Player has always been targeted by attackers and malware authors which might be the reason the company is taking these aggressive steps to prevent users from using it after the EOL. The company will not provide new security and privacy updates for Flash Player after it reaches the End-Of-Life date by the end of this year. This will leave Flash Player users exposed to new attacks and vulnerabilities.
The company wants maximum Flash Player users to uninstall this software before Dec 31st of this year. The company plans to prompt users and ask them to uninstall the software from their devices. However, it is not yet how the ‘prompt’ will look like. The company announced the EOL of Flash Player back in July 2017 together with all significant browser makers including Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Facebook. But, Facebook relied heavily on Flash Player for Facebook’s online gaming platform.
Since the company announced Flash’s EOL, Facebook started to ask game developers to shift to HTML5 and Javascript technologies, and browser makers have also disabled Flash Player in their respective web browsers. Browser vendors are scheduled to remove the Flash Player code from their respective browser codebases before or after the End-Of-Life date of this software.
According to W3Techs, a web technology survey website, 2.6% of websites currently use the code that supports Flash Player. In comparison, 28.5% of websites utilized Flash code at the start of the year 2011. Director of Engineering at Google, Parisa Tabriz, said during, a conference in Feb of the year 2018, that the percentage of daily Chrome users who have loaded at least one web page that contains Flash Player content each day was 80% back in the year 2014. However, this number decreased to under 8% in early 2018, added Parisa Tabriz.
Read next: 5G Will Be the Fastest New Tech to Reach 1 Billion Users
According to Adobe, once Flash Player has reached its EOL date, the company will not only stop providing updates for this software, but the company also plans to remove all download links of Flash Player from the company’s website. This step will prevent people from installing Flash Player and continuing to use an unmaintained version of the software.
Moreover, the company also said that after the End-Of-Life date, the company will block all Flash-based content from running in Adobe Flash Player. This indicates that the company plans to add or has added a ‘time bomb’ in the software code to avoid users from using Flash Player starting 2021.
These decisions are the most aggressive steps taken by a company to prevent its users from using the software after its End-Of-Life date. Adobe Flash Player has always been targeted by attackers and malware authors which might be the reason the company is taking these aggressive steps to prevent users from using it after the EOL. The company will not provide new security and privacy updates for Flash Player after it reaches the End-Of-Life date by the end of this year. This will leave Flash Player users exposed to new attacks and vulnerabilities.
The company wants maximum Flash Player users to uninstall this software before Dec 31st of this year. The company plans to prompt users and ask them to uninstall the software from their devices. However, it is not yet how the ‘prompt’ will look like. The company announced the EOL of Flash Player back in July 2017 together with all significant browser makers including Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Facebook. But, Facebook relied heavily on Flash Player for Facebook’s online gaming platform.
Since the company announced Flash’s EOL, Facebook started to ask game developers to shift to HTML5 and Javascript technologies, and browser makers have also disabled Flash Player in their respective web browsers. Browser vendors are scheduled to remove the Flash Player code from their respective browser codebases before or after the End-Of-Life date of this software.
According to W3Techs, a web technology survey website, 2.6% of websites currently use the code that supports Flash Player. In comparison, 28.5% of websites utilized Flash code at the start of the year 2011. Director of Engineering at Google, Parisa Tabriz, said during, a conference in Feb of the year 2018, that the percentage of daily Chrome users who have loaded at least one web page that contains Flash Player content each day was 80% back in the year 2014. However, this number decreased to under 8% in early 2018, added Parisa Tabriz.
Read next: 5G Will Be the Fastest New Tech to Reach 1 Billion Users
