Back in July 2017, Adobe first announced that it will no longer update or distribute Flash Player as of the end of 2020. At the time of writing this, that EOL is 3 months away. In a new post on its Adobe Flash Player EOL information page, Adobe said that after Dec. 31, it will freeze updates for Flash, remove Flash Player download links from its website, and block Flash-based content from running in Adobe Flash Player, (more on this further down).

Adobe plans to prompt users and ask them to uninstall Flash Player from their computers by the end of the year when the software is scheduled to reach End-Of-Life (EOL), on December 31, 2020. The move was announced in a new Flash Player EOL support page that Adobe published in June, six months before the EOL date.

Adobe says that once Flash reached the EOL date, "Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date," suggesting the company has added or plans to add a so-called "time bomb" in the Flash Player code to prevent users from using it starting next year. These are some of the most aggressive decisions a software company has taken to block users from using its software once it reaches EOL.

Why do this?
The reason for these moves is that Flash Player has always been targeted by hackers and malware authors. Flash is known to be a favorite target for cyberattacks, particularly for exploit kits, zero-day attacks and phishing schemes. That, and the emergence of open standards (like HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly) that serve as viable alternatives for Flash content has prompted Adobe to hit the kill switch on the software. Once Flash Player reaches EOL at the end of the year, Adobe doesn't plan to provide new security updates, leaving Flash users exposed to new vulnerabilities and attacks.

The end-of-life announcement has widespread impact on developers, enterprises, and consumers using specific OS environments or browsers, and Adobe has worked with an array of technology partners (including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla) to prepare for EOL.

“The major browser vendors are integrating these open standards into their browsers and deprecating most other plug-ins (like Adobe Flash Player),” said Adobe.

“By announcing our business decision in 2017, with three years’ advance notice, we believed that would allow sufficient time for developers, designers, businesses, and other parties to migrate existing Flash content as needed to new, open standards.”

For instance, Google dumped default Flash support in Chrome 76, while Mozilla also announced it would kill default support for Adobe Flash in Firefox 69. Microsoft disabled Flash by default in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer in  2019, and said it would fully remove Flash from both browsers in December 2020.

Why are you posting this?
The reason I am posting this, is over the past month, I have been checking out the most popular threads that seem to be being read, and some of them have been on the Flash Games and the Arcade. Well, the games that I have in the Downloads' section will be removed at the end of September and I want to get the word out that if your site has the arcade still running, (those of you still running older versions of the CMS), or those that have flash on your site, that it is time to remove the flash and just remember it as a distant memory.

This also will cause issues with older themes that were packed with Flash, especially when it comes to menu's effects. For those of you with older themes that had a lot of flash, it is time to start getting this switched over and modified, since you will no longer be able to flash on your site. For the most part, contacting the original developer can help with that, but, if you feel adventurous, give it a try your self if you're new to all this.


Adobe EOL Page:

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