The writing has been on the wall for a long time. While Flash played a crucial role in the early days of the Internet (it used to be, for example, YouTube’s standard way to play your videos), it has become obsolete. Open web standards such as HTML5 allowed content to be embedded directly into web pages.
Even when it was still useful, it was far from universally loved. When some iPhone users lamented the lack of Flash on their devices, making some websites unusable, apple (AAPL) Co-founder Steve Jobs refused to give in. In 2010, he wrote a scathing open letter about the software, saying that iPhones and iPads would never support Flash, which for years was plagued by errors and security vulnerabilities.
This marked the beginning of the end. A year later, Adobe said it would no longer develop the software on mobile devices.
Flash Player continued to be a ubiquitous computer tool for multiple web browsers, with more than 1 billion users just a decade ago, making it a particularly useful vulnerability for hackers. The software was a notorious target for hackers and caused numerous high-profile security breaches.
When HTML5 began to overtake Flash, usage declined. In 2014, 80% of Google Chrome users visited a site with Flash code. This fell to 17% in 2017 alone.
Adobe (ADBE) announced its plan to suspend support for Flash three years ago – and the show’s “end of life” day finally arrived on December 31st. Although some operating systems and browsers have already left Flash, Adobe encourages users to check that Flash Player is not immediately uninstalled on their devices “to help protect their systems,” because it will no longer receive security updates.
The company has released uninstall instructions for Windows and Mac users. Here’s how it works:
- Download an uninstaller for Flash Player. (There’s a different one for each operating system; and if you’re using a Mac, look at the version of the operating system you’re using.)
- Run the uninstaller. (On Windows, you must first close all browsers and programs that use Flash. On iOS, you will do this as part of the process.)
- You can then verify that the uninstall was successful by restarting your computer and checking the Flash Player status on your computer from the Adobe website.
Long time, Flash Player.