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The Adobe Flash Player plug-in, which allowed users to listen to and view audio and video content in early web browsers, will no longer work earlier this year, writes BBC.
Adobe has announced that it will stop developing Flash Player after December 31, 2020, and that after January 12, 2021, the company will actively block Flash content running on Flash Player.
The lack of future updates will cause attackers to take advantage of existing security problems.
Thus, in the near future, Flash Player users will receive notifications to uninstall the application, which is highly recommended by Adobe.
Why Flash Player Was Popular
When Flash was first released in 1996, most Internet users had very slow Internet connections compared to today.
Adobe Flash Player enabled web designers to offer various types of content in a small format that could be quickly downloaded.
“You could do a full three-minute animation with multiple characters, backgrounds, sounds and music in less than 2MB and viewable from the browser,” said animator David Firth.
According to Adobe, in 2009, Flash Player was installed on 99% of computers connected to the Internet.
But then more and more people started using smartphones, and the company reacted strongly to the changes.
Due to security concerns, Adobe was unable to adapt the software to the era of smartphones.
In 2015, Apple disabled the plugin in its Safari web browser and Google began blocking Flash content in Chrome.
In July 2017, Adobe announced that it would be abandoning Flash in 2020.
