We begin the year 2021 with news that surely will not catch anyone off guard, it is the end of the life of Adobe Flash Player, an event that took place on December 31, 2020, as had been stipulated since 2017, when Adobe announced the end of its support and updates.
The end of Adobe Flash Player
As many of you will know, the Adobe Flash multimedia platform was responsible for powering animations, graphics, pages, applications, and web games where more than one used to spend their time growing up. Adobe Flash certainly enjoyed great cultural relevance among netizens, so its departure means more than shutting down an outdated application.
It should be noted that Adobe will not start blocking Flash content until January 12, 2021. However, from January 1, 2021 there will no longer be anything to block, since Microsoft has already started to override Adobe Flash in all officially supported versions of Windows. For its part, Apple did the same in September of last year.
Also, major browser vendors such as Google and Mozilla have already removed Flash support.
The current recommendation is to uninstall it from your devices or browsers if for some reason you still have it; since it shouldn’t work even if you find Flash content that hasn’t been removed from the internet.
Be that as it may, Flash will be forever remembered for the crucial role it played in the evolution of web content during the dawn of the internet. Some will even try to preserve its existence in third-party browsers for a few more years (although without official support), such as Pale Moon; meanwhile, sites like the Internet Archive will preserve some of their content (mostly games) with the help of Ruffle, a Flash emulator.
