And just like that it was gone in a “Flash” (maybe a few years too late).
Well, not for another three years will we see the very end of Adobe’s Flash Media Player but the company announced that the time is drawing near. We’ve all seen the technology slowly depreciating over the past several years with the advent of newer standards and it shouldn’t be a surprise to the industry that they’re planning for the end of Flash.
According to Adobe’s news release regarding the matter, specifically they will no longer update or distribute the Flash Player at the end of the year 2020 and will encourage website creators, contributors, etc. to start the process of moving away from existing Flash content if they have not already.
To provide a quick background for those who haven’t been on the Internet for more than ten years, around 2005 Flash started to really take hold and was widely used around the web and designers started to realize the adaptability of the tool. Flash allowed people to add animation aspects to websites that gave them an extra layer of depth rather than just a content heavy, no frills site. It spawned creativity. It was about five years later when newer technology was becoming more prevalent and more widely used that it began to see a dip.
Although Flash will completely be phased out at the end of 2020, chances are you don’t see a whole lot of it being used today. That’s because in large part newer sites aren’t using it because other technologies with a wider adoption rate are available. In particular HTML 5 has become a commonplace thanks to its support on not just traditional desktop browsers but also on mobile devices. HTML 5 was and is generally compatible with all major modern browsers where Flash fell behind. Ultimately, the product fell prey to obsolescence with the advent of better alternatives, more widespread support, and issues with security. One can argue that the death knell for Flash started with Steve Jobs’ open statement that it would not be supported by iOS devices meaning that anything Flash would miss out on a large market share of potential visitors.
If you have an older website that hasn’t been touched in years and are using Flash, reach out to our full service St Louis in-house web design team today so we can talk about future proofing your site against the eventual need to move away from Adobe’s Flash Player.