It has been with us for almost two and a half decades, and now it is going down in the annals of Internet history: Adobe’s Flash Player has its on December 31, 2020 End-of-Life-Status
Although Adobe no longer offers support for the Flash Player, content can still be played until January 12, 2021. After that it is finally over and all content is blocked for the runtime environment.
What is Flash Player anyway and why is it controversial?
The Flash Player makes it possible to use multimedia and interactive content (such as games, video clips or music) in the Internet browser. It was developed by Macromedia, which was acquired by Adobe in 2005, and introduced as an industry standard in 1996.
Flash Player under review: Over the years, however, Flash Player has been criticized for its poor performance. In addition, there were sometimes serious security gaps, which is why hackers liked to use it as a gateway into computer systems, like a look into the CVE database (Common Vulnerabilities ans Exposures) reveals. In 2015, Facebook’s security chief even demanded “Adobe Flash should finally die”.
What were the best games in 2020, what were the biggest upsets? Find out more in our GameStar Plus Report:
more on the subject
Peter looks back on 2020
Why is the Flash Player being discontinued?
Adobe announced the end of Flash Player already in 2017. The main reason given was the rapid development of open standards such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly.
What does the end of support mean for us users?
For most users, very little is likely to change, as Flash Player was blocked in many web browsers years ago. Instead, the above-mentioned open standards are used.
However, if you are still using Flash Player, you should uninstall it immediately so as not to endanger the security of your system, because there will be no more security patches – not even until January 12th.
Microsoft has been providing update KB4577586 since the end of October, which removes Adobe Flash Player from your Windows PC. If you haven’t received the update automatically, you can also get it manually (you can download it here). You can also uninstall the Flash Player manually or via the Adobe Uninstaller (you can download it here).
Not only did Flash Player not survive 2020, a number of games were also discontinued:
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Discontinued Games 2020 – These games didn’t survive the year
