The Imminent Death Of Adobe Flash

Steve Jobs said it out loud, and the press had a field day. Facebook finally hit the roof about it, and Firefox decided to kill it.

Adobe’s Flash Player, that is.

In no uncertain terms, Steve Jobs wrote a 1681-word piece on the subject of Adobe Flash, its limitations and vulnerabilities, and why it is an element of the “PC and mice” era. According to Steve Jobs, Adobe Flash did not belong in the era of touch screen devices. It didn’t belong on his company’s devices, and he certainly felt like it shouldn’t belong anywhere else.

Five years later, Facebook and Firefox are throwing the proverbial soil on Flash’s coffin.

Earlier this year, YouTube switched from Flash to HTML5. Just as Jobs advocated.

On July 12, 2015, Facebook security chief Alex Stamos posted a tweet, calling for the death of Flash. In response to his tweet, Mozilla Firefox immediately pulled the plug on Adobe Flash on July 13, 2015. R.I.P. Adobe Flash, at least, on Firefox browsers everywhere.

This comes on the heels of spyware team, aptly calling itself the “Hacking Team,” by the way, getting hacked themselves, no thanks to, yes, Adobe Flash. With these security loopholes exposing even teams of hackers to software vulnerabilities, indeed, the time is ripe to send Adobe Flash to the deep beyond, on a Viking funeral pile, no less.

The Adobe Flash Player no longer works on Firefox by default, and so, you may see websites with certain elements blocked off the page. There is still an option to allow the temporary unblocking of Flash on Firefox’s Desktop application, however.

You may recall that Adobe stopped supporting Flash on smartphones in 2011. While Android used the presence of Flash support as a selling point initially, that move by Adobe caused the rendering of web content on Androids to be increasingly dependent on HTML5.

Less than 11% of websites are heavily dependent on Adobe Flash.