Adobe Flash Player has finally reached the end of its life

Adobe Flash Player will no longer be available this year as it has officially been laid to rest.

Adobe will not offer security updates for Flash. It has urged users to uninstall it. The software was facing security issues and it failed to become compatible with the smartphone era.

All videos and animations running in its Flash Player will not be available from 12th January.

The software was one of the most popular ways to stream videos and play online games. It was launched in 1996.

A number of internet users connected via dial-up connections when Flash was released. Internet at that time was quite slow.

However, Flash designers and animators provided quality content with speedy download service.

“You could make a full three-minute animation with multiple characters, backgrounds, sounds, and music less than 2 megabytes (MB) and viewable from within the browser,” explained animator David Firth.

He added, “I just made the stuff I wanted to see that I felt was missing: dark, surreal comedy,”

“There were no shortcuts to viral content. No corporate fingers twiddling the algorithms. It was simply attention-grabbing and quality material that rose to the top.”

“It was the first website I’d ever seen that allowed anyone to post content and it is available in real-time. If the community felt the content was low quality, it would get removed at the end of the day so you actually had to take that into account when posting,” he said.

Flash achieved great popularity, it was installed on 99% of internet-connected desktop PCs.

“We had optimized for lower-end phones with Flash Lite,” explains David Mendels, former executive vice president of products at Adobe.

“It was incredibly successful in places like Japan, but it wasn’t the same as the full desktop Flash. It wasn’t fully compatible.”