Back in 2017, Adobe announced that it would cease support for its classic multimedia software, Flash Player, at the end of 2020. With today being December 31, 2020, the company will officially cut ties with the decades-old platform at the stroke of midnight. Flash content will also be blocked from running in Flash Player beginning on January 12.
“Since Adobe will no longer be supporting Flash Player after December 31, 2020 and Adobe will block Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021, Adobe strongly recommends all users immediately uninstall Flash Player to help protect their systems,” the company wrote on its Adobe Flash Player EOL General Information Page. “Some users may continue to see reminders from Adobe to uninstall Flash Player from their system.”
While many of us have fond memories of playing Flash games during our youth, the platform has been obsoleted by safer, open standards that offer the same functionalities such as HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly. Those of you who are feeling nostalgic can check out the Internet Archive’s Flash collection, which allows users to revisit historical Flash content in their browsers without the original plugin.
“Utilizing an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle, we have added Flash support to the Internet Archive’s Emularity system, letting a subset of Flash items play in the browser as if you had a Flash plugin installed,” archive.org’s Jason Scott explained. “While Ruffle’s compatibility with Flash is less than 100%, it will play a very large portion of historical Flash animation in the browser, at both a smooth and accurate rate.”
As noted above, Adobe will not be blocking Flash content from running until January 12, but major browsers such as Chrome and Firefox will reportedly hit the kill switch tomorrow. Microsoft has already released an update that allows Windows users to remove Adobe Flash Player from their systems.
“Beginning in January 2021, Adobe Flash Player will be disabled by default and all versions older than KB4561600 released in June 2020 will be blocked,” the company wrote in a blog post from September. “Downloadable resources related to Adobe Flash Player that are hosted on Microsoft websites will no longer be available.”