Adobe’s Flash Player is probably one of the most controversial pieces of software nowadays, as the platform keeps getting exploited by attackers who reveal various vulnerabilities in it, allowing them to infect thousands of computers every day. And while Adobe are constantly releasing new updates to combat the issue, it’s a cat-and-mouse game in which they’re ultimately losing.
The number of security flaws in the platform is simply too great for Adobe to keep up with its updates, it seems, and this has only led to an increase in popularity for Flash among hackers lately. Indeed, the last few months have seen the release of even more security vulnerabilities, and with them, new updates from Adobe’s side.
It’s an annoying situation for users too, who have to keep installing new updates on a nearly daily basis, or face the risk of getting infected by simply browsing to the wrong website. It doesn’t even have to be the fault of the site administrator in the first place, it could easily be the result of malicious advertisements planted by a hacker.
Developers of all major browsers have realized how serious the issue is and have started to deprecate the use of Flash in their own products, encouraging users to stop using it for good. As of now, some browsers actually block Java, Flash and other similar types of plugins by default, and in the future they will most likely drop support for those plugins completely.
The Web is moving towards a standardized platform relying on JavaScript and WebGL, thanks to HTML5, and that move has been enjoying more and more popularity and widespread adoption among software developers. Both browser programmers and website designers/developers seem to agree that dropping support for Flash would be for the best at this point.
Even companies in other fields, like Unity, have decided to move away from the idea of having their own software as separate plugins, and have started to adopt technologies like WebGL instead. In general, the Internet is slowly but surely shifting away from reliance on Flash, and in some time, the platform might be gone completely.
And from the looks of it, it won’t even be missed much. There is some legacy content around the Internet that will become inaccessible once Flash is out for good, but the webmasters hosting that content will probably find a way to convert it to more modern formats. There will surely be tools for that at some point, as the need for easy conversion is already being recognized in some developer circles, and will surely become an even more obvious fact later on in the future.