Adobe has announced that it will stop developing and and distributing Flash Player at the end of 2020 because “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.”
Adobe says the impending end of Flash is also due to collaboration with its “technology partners,” including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla. Adobe will continue to support Flash on a number of major OSs and browsers that currently support Flash content through the planned EOL [end-of-life]. This will include issuing regular security patches, maintaining OS and browser compatibility and adding features and capabilities as needed.
The end of Flash is overdue. In June 2016 the Global Media Format Report 2016 from Encoding.com predicted that the Flash video codec — which the late Steve Jobs despised — will vanish within 24 months.
