Adobe Axes Flash

Adobe has finally said that they plan to phase out its Flash Player by 2020.

Adobe's vice president of product development, Govind Balakrishnan, said they had chosen to end Flash because other technologies such as HTML5 had "matured enough and are capable enough to provide viable alternatives to the Flash player."

The technology was once widely used in web development to enable people to watch videos and play games online but in recent years, due to speed issues and security risks caused by flawed code the technology lost its appeal.

Once HTML5 was released, which offered much of the Flash functionality without all the setbacks, Flash became pretty much irrelevant.

This has been a long time coming, and Apple was the first to criticise Flash publicly back in 2009 with Steve Jobs writing a scathing 1,688 word public letter regarding its shortcomings, where he highlighted concerns about reliability, security and performance.

The plug-in was never supported by the iPhone.

Most browsers also have been disabling Flash Player by default in recent years.

Ultimately, all of this has led to a significant decrease in Flash usage, with Google stating that only 17% of Chrome users visit a site that depends on Flash each day (compared to a massive 80% just 3 years ago).