Why everybody should be happy that Flash is finally dying
Adobe (ADBE) acknowledged the inevitable Tuesday when it announced that it “will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020.”
That multimedia browser plug-in was once such an inescapable part of the web that Adobe thought it could persuade Apple (AAPL) to add it to the iPhone. Now-deceased Apple co-founder Steve Jobs replied in 2010 with a 1,681-word “Thoughts on Flash” post that denounced Adobe’s creation as a proprietary, insecure, buggy, and battery-eating menace to the mobile web.
Seven-plus years after the manifesto that Adobe tried to counter with passive-aggressive newspaper ads and then mobile software that shipped late and worked poorly, its multimedia player is officially doomed on screens everywhere. That’s quite a comedown for a technology that, Adobe bragged in 2009, was on over 98% of internet-enabled desktops and played 75% of all videos viewed online.
But it’s great news if you don’t like having your computer left more vulnerable to online break-ins.
Die, Flash, die!
There are many reasons to resent Flash, some recounted at length in Jobs’ post and others left unsaid there. (Pointless animated intro pages on restaurant sites, I’m shaking my fist at you.) But the problem that ultimately sank Flash was security—something the Apple co-founder didn’t mention until more than a third of the way into his screed.
In the years after, Flash increasingly resembled the equivalent of a screen door on a submarine. As a program that originally had wide access to your machine but could be called upon by any site–or even any ad on a site–it was a tempting target for malware authors.
It didn’t help that Flash historically made it a pain to stay up to date. A June 2010 update, for instance, required Windows users to download separate download-manager apps for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox—each of which would push a McAfee security-scan tool.
Five years later, a study by McAfee, by then an Intel (INTC) subsidiary, found almost 200,000 new Flash malware samples in circulation in the first quarter of that year—a 317% increase from a year earlier. The vulnerabilities and subsequent patches have kept coming since, with seven “critical” Flash updates released so far this year.
Flash’s decline on the desktop wasn’t as fast as its failure in mobile devices—after its Android player arrived behind schedule on devices like the Motorola Xoom tablet that nobody bought anyway, the company abandoned mobile-Flash efforts in late 2011. Apple stopped bundling Flash on new Macs beginning in late 2010, while Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT) steadily restricted the versions of Flash included in their own browsers.