While today’s Flash player did not started at the hands of Adobe (it didn’t even started as being called Flash either), Adobe nevertheless is the one to shut it down.
After suffering significant loses in market share for the past several years (about 80% according to some resources), even Adobe realizes that it’s just a matter of time before Flash would become completely irrelevant.
Though Adobe is the one to make the final decision, it pretty obvious it wasn’t exactly what the company wanted to happen, but a result of the global market decision to remove Adobe’s monopoly from Web animations and delegate the authority to a wider group of forces.
As the company note in their announcement:
“Today, most browser vendors are integrating capabilities once provided by plugins directly into browsers and deprecating plugins.”
“Given this progress, […] Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
Adobe will continue to support Flash on all currently supported platforms and browsers through 2020, including issuing regular security patches, maintaining OS and browser compatibility and adding features and capabilities as needed.
Despite abandoning its flagship product, Adobe’s influence will not be ended as the company still participates in contributing to HTML5 standards as well as WebAssembly Community Group. The company will also continue to provide animation and video tools such as Animate CC – tool for developing HTML5 content.
Goodbye Fresh Pepper Player
In the open source Linux realm, ever since Adobe stopped releasing its Flash Player for the platform (when Flash was at version 11.2), we’ve all been through some rough times when it comes to Internet browsing.
Some of you may remember encountering all sorts of issues due to the transitioning from Adobe’s Flash Player to Google’s “Pepper” implementation of it.
Since Google has been building it’s Pepper player to fit the standards of its own web browser – Chrome, other web browsers (Firefox, Midori, etc) users were having a really bad experience, especially when visiting video streaming sites like YouTube and similar.
A bad experience which induced the development of Fresh Pepper Player – a wrapper plugin meant to get Flash player working on Firefox and other browsers.
Now that HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have popped into the scene, and of course, since Flash Player is going to be shut off – there would be no longer need for Fresh nor Pepper player in the upcoming future, and Linux users would finally get the same experience their Windows and Mac counterparts get.
