Farewell to Adobe Flash Player
In December 2020, a significant event occurred in the history of the Internet - Adobe stopped supporting Flash Player. However, this was expected, because the technology has long been considered outdated and unsafe; today other standards apply.
Adobe asked developers to switch to the new HTML5 standard starting in 2015. Two years later, the company announced the imminent cessation of support for this product...
But, meanwhile, it was Flash that made the Internet as we know it today.
What is AdobeFlash?
Flash technology appeared in 1996; before that time, all pages on the Internet were static. It was Flash that made it possible to implement video, animation and various interactive objects into websites. The new technology made it possible to draw high-quality vector graphics with smooth animation of a very small volume, which was important in times of slow Internet.
True, in those distant times this seemingly progressive phenomenon also had a downside. Many webmasters liked the new features so much that some sites turned into a cacophony of bright flashing banners.
Flash is a technology that allows you to play various multimedia content on web pages. This can be video and audio, games and interactive objects with which the user interacts. Flash also displays animated advertisements. Files that display multimedia come in SWF, FLV and F4V formats, but of course you need a separate program to play them. All browsers cannot play Flash objects by default; special software is integrated into them for this purpose.
Reasons for ending support
One of the reasons for discontinuing support is money. Before the advent of the Android and iOS operating systems, thousands of aggregator sites with Flash games successfully operated on the Internet. After some time, these games appeared on social networks. In turn, software developers, websites and social networks shared the profits among themselves. When smartphones became a mass phenomenon, Google and Apple came to the conclusion that the mobile games market was so interesting that they needed to take full control of it.
To do this, it was only necessary to abandon Flash support in mobile operating systems. Interestingly, this happened at the same time that Adobe was developing its own platform for distributing mobile games. As a result, Adobe was forced to retreat and forget about games for mobile devices.
Back in 2007, during the presentation of the first generation Apple iPhone, Steve Jobs said that the new iOS mobile operating system would never support Flash. Steve Jobs cited Apple's reluctance to depend on other software developers and high energy consumption as the reasons for the refusal. Apple's abandonment of Flash also had an impact on its distribution.
However, there is another version of the reason for the failure - the vulnerability of the technology. From the very beginning, this product was characterized by its “holeiness”. The first virus detection scandal occurred back in 2002. Since then, information about a variety of vulnerabilities in Flash has appeared with enviable regularity. The program is multi-platform, and due to its many vulnerabilities, Flash has always been popular with hackers.
In 2013, millions of computers around the world were infected with the Angler exploit, which was used by attackers to distribute crypto-ransomware. For many months, Angler was not seen by all known antivirus programs.
In 2014, Recorded Future conducted a study that showed that Adobe Flash Player is the most hacked software product. Flash Player at that time contained 8 of the 10 most famous “holes”, and in total 425 such vulnerabilities were found in the study. For example, the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser was in second place for vulnerabilities in the Recorded Future report, but 155 were found in it. holes" - almost three times less. Adobe did not solve the problem with the vulnerability until the end of support.
Possible consequences of using the software
It is important to understand that after the end of support, the player will only become more vulnerable every day. To protect your operating system from infection, it is best to remove this software. This is exactly what Adobe recommends doing. After uninstallation, you will no longer be able to download this software from the official source.
If you go to the official Adobe website, you can see that the page with FlashPlayer no longer exists. At the moment, this program is distributed only on third-party resources.
You can delete program files while checking for updates for Windows, because at this moment a notification appears with a recommendation to remove the outdated program. It is also easy to remove Flash Player using various system optimization programs, such as CCleaner.
After uninstallation, users of Windows 8, 10 and Server operating systems will not be able to install Flash Player again through system settings; the distribution will be marked as unsafe.
How to replace FlashPlayer
Before deleting program files from the computer, many users will probably ask a completely logical question about how to play games on Odnoklassniki and Vkontakte, how to listen to music and watch videos? Browser developers are aware of this problem, so many of them have released special versions that support Flash technology. For example, there is a special version of the Yandex Browser RBK Games, which supports outdated flash games on social networks. One of the analogues of Adobe Flash is the solution from Microsoft - Silverlight. This cross-browser solution also allows you to open animations, but at the moment the technology is also outdated. Another solution is Ruffle, which the developers call a Flash Player emulator. The Ruffle plugin is available for installation in the Chrome Store.
Flash objects can be downloaded from websites and played on your computer. To download videos, games and other objects, you can use the Downloadhelper or Download Master plugins. You can also download Flash using Jdownloader or Orbit Downloader. You can open the downloaded file on your computer using SWF File Player or Flash Player Projector.
Does it make sense to replace FlashPlayer
It is important to know that this technology cannot be used without risk. Currently, there is a security risk in almost every line of Flash Player code. Experts say that there is only one way to make this product completely safe - to completely rewrite it from scratch. Therefore, if you do not want to become a victim of attackers, it is better to forget about Flash Player.
For ten years, developers have been converting games, applications, audio and video to a new format - HTML5. The new standard has a higher level of security, it is less demanding on resources and never crashes, as often happened with Flash.
After Adobe announced the end of support for its product, many sites began to quickly transfer content to the new standard. Accordingly, today Flash is found only on abandoned sites that have not been updated for a long time.
