Certainly, many of the learning resources my children have been encouraged to use by their schools during the coronavirus lockdown have required Flash.īlueMaxima’s Flashpoint is dubbed a “webgame preservation project”, designed to archive tens of thousands of Flash-based browser games that were popular around the turn of the century and onwards. That’s not to say there’s no useful Flash content left out there. The problem, of course, is that many of those sites will have been abandoned years ago or that it’s simply not worth the developer’s effort to port the content. Migration optionsĪdobe and others have produced several tools over the years that allow web developers to migrate their Flash content to HTML5 or other more modern web technologies.
There are various estimates of how many websites there are in the world, with most suggesting there are between 1.5bn and 2bn, which means the number actually running Flash content will easily run into the millions, if not tens of millions. Flash will also be retired from these browsers by early 2021 at the latest, leaving users with nowhere official to go if they want to access Flash-based sites or content.įlash is used as client-side programming language by 2.6% of the sites it has measured this month, which equates to 260,000 of the top 10 million sites still using Flash. However, support for Flash is already restricted in browsers, with Chrome throwing up warnings every time users attempt to access Flash content in the browser, for instance. “Customers should not use Flash Player after the EOL Date since it will not be supported by Adobe.”Īdobe is also warning customers off third-party players, claiming that such “unauthorized downloads are a common source of malware and viruses”.įlash has been built into many web browsers over the years, including Google Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge.
“Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date,” Adobe’s update states. Adobe says it will stop offering Flash player downloads at the end of the year and will even block Flash content running from players that remain installed on people’s computers.