Creative-software house Adobe is urging users to uninstall Adobe Flash, before the software reaches End-Of-Life (EOL) in December 2020.
System administrators can find details on the end of Flash support here.
Flash is being retired for cybersecurity reasons: the same technology which can easily load web-based games or other client-side content is especially vulnerable to exploitation by hackers to run malicious scripts on a user’s device.
Adobe state in an update on their website that all security updates, and the availability of all version downloads, will cease from this date.
Flash-based content will also cease working – leading technical experts to suggest Adobe have recently programmed a ‘time-bomb’ into the code of Flash Player to render it useless after the supported date. This should help prevent users seeking out third-party versions, and represents one of the strictest policies towards end-of-life enacted by a major software developer.
Fewer and fewer websites still operate this way (possibly as low as 2.6%) since the original announcement of the technology being retired in July 2017. This follows major browser developers, including Google, Microsoft, Apple & Mozilla urging developers to transition to HTML5 and Javascript alternatives that are more integrated into the browser itself.
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