While many observers were pretty sure that the death of Adobe's Flash Player wasn't inevitable, a new report suggests that day might come a little sooner than expected.
Flash, ubiquitous in browsers, is on “life support” and will disappear within the next two years, a new report from encoding.com predicts. The prediction follows the report’s findings that Flash usage fell by 15% in 2015, compared to the previous year.
While it hasn't completely disappeared, the report notes that the technology is now primarily used in banner and older browsers.
“While Flash is still used for specific use cases and edge cases, such as banner ads and legacy browsers, its days are numbered,” the 2016 Global Media Format Report states. “Flash outputs declined by almost 15% in 2015. We expect to see Flash video codecs disappear completely from our report within 24 months.”
Flash had become a central part of how we browse the Internet in the early 2000s, as it was used to display games and other interactive elements on websites, as well as play videos and music. But modern technology has made Flash completely unnecessary, and using the now-maligned browser plugin has become risky in recent years, especially after several high-profile security vulnerabilities were linked to the software.
It seems even Adobe may be ready to abandon Flash — at least in name. The company announced in December that it was rebranding Flash Professional as Adobe Animate CC to “more accurately represent its position as the leading animation tool for the web and beyond.”
