Adobe has set the official date for the end of support for its famous flash player program, the browser plug-in that brought rich and interactive animations to the early web, at the end of 2020.
The company will not start blocking flash content until January 12, the major browsers have stopped support, and Microsoft bans it in most versions of Windows.
The flash player was released in 1996 and was once one of the most common ways for people to stream videos and play games online.
But the flash player has suffered from security problems and failed to move into the smartphone age, and Adobe will no longer provide security updates for the plug-in, and has urged people to uninstall it.
When the flash player was first released, most Internet users were connected via dial-up which was very slow by today's standards.
But the flash player allowed web and animation designers to deliver exciting content that can be downloaded relatively quickly.
You can make a full three-minute animation with multiple characters, backgrounds, sounds and music with a size of less than 2MB that can be displayed within your browser.
Sites, such as Newgrounds, which have been described as youtubes's flash content platform, have emerged to serve the growing demand for animation and interactive games.
Newgrounds allowed people to post available content in real time, and content is removed at the end of the day if the community feels that the content is of low quality.
The flash was more than just animation, it also allowed websites, such as YouTube, to broadcast high-quality videos.
By 2009, Adobe said, the flash player was installed on 99 percent of internet-connected desktops.
At that time, the world began to shift towards mobile devices, and Adobe was slow to respond.
"We improved low-level phones with Flash Lite, which was successful in places like Japan, but wasn't like a full flash desktop player, and it wasn't entirely compatible," explains David Mendels, former Executive Vice President of Products at Adobe.
Major brands, such as Facebook and YouTube, broadcast videos via smartphones without flash, and in November 2011 Adobe completed the development of the flash player for mobile devices.
It continued to produce the plug-in for desktop computers, but suffered from multiple security flaws.
In 2015, Apple disabled the plug-in in safari web browser by default, and Google's Chrome browser began blocking some parts of flash content.
Adobe announced in July 2017 that it would end the flash engine in 2020, and explained that other technologies, such as HTML5, were ready to provide the alternative, without requiring users to install and update the plug-in.
Given that Adobe is moving to prevent flash player from viewing content from January 12th, there are fears that years of animation, games and interactive sites will be lost.
Gaming company Zynga closed the original version of FarmVille on New Year's Eve after 11 years, relying on the flash player.
An open collaborative project known as Ruffle is developing a program that can run such content in a web browser without the need for the plug-in.
"We want to thank all our customers and developers who have used flash content over the past two decades, and we are proud that the flash player has played a critical role in developing web content through animation, interactive, audio and video," Adobe said in the final update.
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