Firefox 85 In January Will Completely Kill Off Flash Support
It's been a while since we've heard of any announcement concerning Flash and most have probably presumed it was already dead anyway. After all, it was years ago when Adobe, who bought Flash creator Macromedia a long, long time ago, announced that it would eventually stop supporting the former darling of the Web. The clock is ticking and fate has finally caught up with Flash and Mozilla is making sure that its remaining users know that Flash will completely stop working in the latest version of Firefox coming next year.
Flash has become pretty much a bad word on the Web, perhaps even worse than ads. After all, it was Flash that also enabled intrusive ads back before advertisers wised up and updated to HTML 5. More than that, Flash has become a security liability and, rather than spend thousands if not millions of dollars trying to fix it, Adobe decided to just cut its losses and abandon it.
It set a deadline for January 2021 when it will completely cease supporting Flash and even remove all official downloads for the software. Mozilla now reminds users that version 85 of Firefox, which will be released on January 26, 2021, will not have Flash support either. Whether that means older versions will still be able to load Flash content is unclear as its says the plugin will stop loading those starting January 12.
This synchronized deadline for Flash support is something users should take note of. After this year, any download for the Flash player software should be considered suspect as it will no longer come directly from Adobe nor shipped by browser makers. These, Adobe warns, could be laden with malware that will take advantage of some users' desire to load the remaining Flash content on the Web.
Sites using Flash these days are admittedly fewer but they do still exist. Some sites still try to cater to remaining users of the technology that employed it for making interactive content. There have been attempts to either port these games and videos to current Web technologies or create a sort of compatibility layer for Flash. The time for these projects, however, is quickly running out.