Adobe Flash is Going Away in 2020
From Greg Kozera at ELM Learning:
"At the end of July last year, Adobe announced the impending death of Adobe Flash in 2020, and letting out a collective sigh of relief, most of the internet and its major browsers agreed to do the same. Google has already begun taking steps to remove Flash from their browser while the rest of the web settles in for the long goodbye.
"In case you aren’t quite sure what the deal with Adobe Flash is, here’s the Cliffs Notes version: Adobe Flash is a software platform that was designed to run video, animation, and games on any given webpage. Flash was born right around the time the internet was really getting its feet wet and quickly became the go-to for anything that needed video support on the web. When YouTube adopted Flash in 2005, it more or less sealed the deal on its popularity. However, as other apps and technologies have developed, Flash’s ability to compete, along with its efficiency and popularity, has been in major decline. It’s no secret that even from the beginning, Flash has been, well, buggy. In 2010, Steve Jobs himself wrote “Thoughts on Flash,” an open proclamation on the Apple website outlining the six major reasons iOS would not support the platform, heavily citing both crippling performance and security concerns.
So, What Will Replace Flash?
"With Adobe Flash discontinued, you may be wondering what will take its place. Enter HTML5, the latest version of “Hypertext Markup Language.” Made up of three kinds of coding ingredients (HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and Javascript), HTML5 will function as an open-source version of Flash. But what does this mean, exactly? Adobe owns Flash, controlling both its vulnerabilities as well as its fixes. But HTML5 is no one’s pet. It allows everyone the ability to take care of issues within HTML5 as well as the visibility to see what’s going on with the platform, so no one’s stonewalled behind the proprietary red tape. Additionally, HTML5 can not only take on the most high-def videos and graphics…it can be used to write web applications that work even if you’re not connected to the internet."