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Reuters

Adobe Systems' Flash, a once-ubiquitous technology used to power most of the media content found online, will be retired at the end of 2020, the software company announced on Tuesday.
Adobe, along with partners Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet's Google, Facebook and Mozilla, said support for Flash will ramp down across the internet in phases over the next three years.
The companies are encouraging developers to migrate their software onto modern programming standards. After 2020, Adobe will stop releasing updates for Flash and web browsers will no longer support it. 
“Few technologies have had such a profound and positive impact in the internet era,” said Govind Balakrishnan, the vice-president of product development at Adobe Creative Cloud.
Created more than 20 years ago, Flash was once the preferred software used by developers to create games, video players and applications capable of running on multiple web browsers.
When Adobe acquired Flash in its 2005 purchase of Macromedia, the technology was on more than 98 per cent of personal computers connected to the web, Macromedia said at the time.
But Flash’s popularity began to wane after Apple’s decision not to support it on the iPhone.
In a public letter in 2010, the late Apple chief executive Steve Jobs criticised Flash’s reliability, security and performance. Since then, other technologies like HTML5 have emerged as alternatives to Flash.
In the past year, several web browsers have begun to require users to enable Flash before running it.
On Google’s Chrome, the most popular web browser, Flash’s usage has already fallen drastically. In 2014, Flash was used each day by 80 per cent of desktop users. That number is now at 17 per cent “and continues to decline,” Google said in a blog on Tuesday.
“This trend reveals that sites are migrating to open web technologies, which are faster and more power-efficient than Flash,” Google said. “They’re also more secure.“
Flash, however, remains in use among some online gamers. Adobe said it will work with Facebook as well as Unity Technologies and Epic Games to help developers migrate their games.
Adobe said it does not expect Flash’s sunset to have an impact on its bottom line. “In fact, we think the opportunity for Adobe is greater in a post-Flash world,” Balakrishnan said.


Adobe Systems retiring Flash by the end of 2020

A view of Adobe Systems headquarters in San Jose, California. The company announced that Adobe Flash will be retired at the end of 2020. Photo: AP

Adobe Systems retiring Flash by the end of 2020

Flash used to power most of media content found online in its heyday