The End of Flash Player is Near
As much as we all hate to admit it, December 31st, 2020 is quickly approaching. If you haven’t noticed the banner running along the top of your Google Chrome pages, Adobe announced that in 2020, Adobe Flash Player will be reaching the end of life and they will no longer be supporting it. In other words, much like video killing the radio star, Google is killing this video performance platform.
What this means is that all web browsers (Google Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Explorer, etc) will be disabling Adobe Flash Player. As you may have noticed in the past year or so Google has already made it quite difficult to enable Flash Player. You no longer have to just click a button to allow, most of the time you have to go in and actually enable it through the browser’s settings for Adobe Flash Player to work properly. This was not meant as an inconvenience for users, but rather a way to get web developers and users on the same page with Google as they planned to disable the player.
So, what needs to happen for everyone to function normally without Flash Player? HTML5. The part that many have ignored since this was announced by Adobe back in 2017, is that all content that is currently using Flash Player needs to be converted to HTML5. This is not all bad news because HTML5 is actually more secure and robust than Flash Player. Users can expect fewer vulnerabilities, quicker content, and more battery life on all mobile devices.
Honestly users should not notice too much of an inconvenience because of this change, however if you do have a website that contains content that needs a Flash Player to run properly, I highly suggest getting into contact with your web developer so that they can lead you down the best path to ensure that your website and users do not notice any type of service interruption. For now, feel free to keep enabling Flash Player, but even though change is hard for us all, know that the day is coming where we will have to make the switch.
If you have any questions on this and how it relates to your business, get in touch! We’ll buy the coffee.
Worksighted Team
We are a team of over-enthusiastic people, ready to help our clients utilize technology to spur growth! We love technology and come to work every day eager to solve problems and find ways to impact our clients.
