Apple has removed all support for Adobe Flash in the latest Safari Technology Preview 99. It’s another step on the long road to the demise of Flash.
In July 2017, Adobe announced that it would 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 said the impending end of Flash is also due to collaboration with its “technology partners,” including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla. Adobe continued to support Flash on a number of major OSs and browsers that currently support Flash content through the planned EOL [end-of-life].
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 — would vanish within 24 months.
Safari Technology Preview Release 99 is now available for download for macOS Catalina and macOS Mojave. If you already have Safari Technology Preview installed, you can update in the Software Update pane of System Preferences on macOS.
Safari Technology Preview provides an early look at upcoming Web technologies that will appear in the browser on macOS, iPadOS and iOS devices.
