IN 2017 FLASH, the comically buggy building block of web media, revealed it would be committing a very slow suicide, eventually losing all support in 2020. Given the amount of security holes it had when it was fully supported by Adobe, this could very well be seen as a mercy killing.
Google Chrome promptly put the boot in, disabling Flash from Chrome 76 by default to try and wean people off it, before the final death in 2020. And now Microsoft has clarified that it’ll be putting its own little kick into Adobe as well by following much the same schedule for Edge.
Technically it had already made the announcement, but things were muddied a little when Microsoft announced it would be switching Edge from EdgeHTML to Chromium. So now it’s rejecting Flash and all its sins all over again.
“In the next version of Microsoft Edge (built on Chromium), we will continue to retire Flash in the same timeframe as other Chromium-based browsers,” wrote Colleen Williams, Microsoft Edge’s senior program manager.
“Flash will initially be disabled, and the user will need to re-enable Flash on a site-by-site basis; Flash will be completely removed from the browser towards the end of 2020.”
Adobe is obviously resigned to the end of Flash, and is probably relishing a future where it doesn’t have a Google alert set up for the words “flash vulnerability”. But even if it wasn’t, Edge abandoning Flash simply isn’t as big a deal as Chrome. As the hypnotic tweet below shows, Microsoft’s once insurmountable position as King of the internet browsers is ancient history:
Usage Share of Internet Browsers 1996 – 2019 (via @reddit https://t.co/D8MD1oQJuu) pic.twitter.com/E8cZAAPjFs
— David Bisset (@dimensionmedia) August 31, 2019
Still, you have a bit longer to beat your high score on Bloons if you’re happy pressing that little button reading “enable Flash.”
“For both the in-market version of Microsoft Edge (built on EdgeHTML) and Internet Explorer 11, the current experience will continue as-is through 2019,” writes Williams.
“Specifically, we no longer intend to update either Microsoft Edge (built on EdgeHTML) or Internet Explorer 11 to disable Flash by default. We still plan to fully remove Flash from these browsers by December 2020, as originally communicated.”
RIP Flash. Again. µ