Adobe announced in February that it’s planning to end the life of Flash by 2020, due to open standards such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly maturing; taking over the capabilities and functionalities that its plugins pioneer.
Despite Adobe’s deadline, it appears that less than 5% of worldwide websites are still using Flash, as most websites favour Javascript for running features instead.
A recent study found that last year, less than 7% of websites use Flash, although, back in 2011, 28.5% of websites were using the tech.
Adobe wrote in a blog post: “Given this progress, and in collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash.
Animation and video tools
“Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.
“Adobe will remain at the forefront of leading the development of new web standards and actively participate in their advancement. This includes continuing to contribute to the HTML5 standard and participating in the WebAssembly Community Group.
“And we’ll continue to provide best in class animation and video tools such as Animate CC, the premier web animation tool for developing HTML5 content, and Premiere Pro CC.”
Google’s Director of Engineering also said at a security conference in San Diego that the number of people using Chrome with Flash has decreased from 80% in 2014 to less than 8% in 2018.
Written by Leah Alger
