Death of the Adobe Flash Player

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Introduced in 1996 the Adobe Flash Player was the wonder land for any developer at the time. Combining a robust visual and object oriented programming environments was its most powerful perk. In addition, including tools for web and stand alone dynamic content production and distribution. Even with all its incredible characteristics, the Adobe Flash Player is now dead for good.



On July 2017, Adobe issued a communication announcing the definitive end of the support of the Flash Player Plugin. Today that statement is a fact: The Adobe Flash Player is no longer available for any browser. Consequently, the company thanked developers and customers for using and creating amazing animations and web content for over two decades. Moreover, they stated to be proud for their role of evolving multimedia content creation across all its implementations.

The company is now encouraging users to completely uninstall the remaining players that are still active. Currently, we can see the message:

Thank you for using Adobe Flash Player.

Adobe will stop supporting Flash Player after December 31, 2020.

To help secure your system, Adobe will block Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021. Please see the Adobe Flash Player EOL General Information Page for more details.

Adobe strongly recommends immediately removing Flash Player from your system by clicking the ‘Uninstall’ button below.

 What killed the Flash Player?

The Flash Player offered second-to-none flexibility to developers, content creators and animators. However, this “freedom” was untenable. The plugin was an offering that originally came with security challenges. In contrast, the internet as we know it nowadays is more secure and a lot more concern about the user privacy. Many blame exploits and malware distribution as the culprits of the Plugin’s death. Nonetheless, the real killer of Flash was the obsolescence.

Adobe puts it more straightforward:

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.

The former CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs once refused to embrace this new technology. He described it as proprietary, too resource-intensive, too unaccommodating. Now we see how this story ends up.

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