Firefox 85 Hammers the Final Nail Into the Adobe Flash Coffin

'With Mozilla's release of Firefox 85 on Tuesday, Adobe's once ubiquitous Flash technology is really gone for good. The software had been widely used to expand gaming, video and animation on the web, though Adobe stopped supporting it at the end of 2020. Firefox was the last major browser to support Flash. From a report: Apple, whose late boss Steve Jobs helped sink Flash by banning it from iPhones and iPads, ditched Flash with Safari 14 in September 2020. Google Chrome, the most widely used browser, completely excised it on Jan. 19 with version 88. Microsoft's Edge 88 followed suit on Jan. 21. The schedule of removals shows just how hard it is to advance technology foundations as widely used as the web. Browser makers for years wanted to remove Flash, replacing it with more advanced standards built directly into the web. Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" letter in 2010 solidified the opposition, and Adobe started recognizing the software's doom by scrapping the Android version of Flash in 2011. It's taken years of effort to drop Flash completely. Adobe took until 2017 to announce that Flash would be completely unsupported at the end of 2020, and still some are willing to jump through lots of hoops to keep Flash around a little longer.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/01/26/1618254 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

On Wed, 27 Jan 2021 12:18:15 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'With Mozilla's release of Firefox 85 on Tuesday, Adobe's once ubiquitous Flash technology is really gone for good.'
Unless you happen to be China Railway Shenyang, where Adobe Flash is an integral part of your mission-critical schedule-planning system. <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/deactivation-of-flash-cripples-chinese-railroad-for-a-day/> <https://technode.com/2021/01/19/thrills-suspense-flash-updates-dalian-railway-tech-support-goes-viral/> <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=flash+dalian>

On Wed, 27 Jan 2021 12:18:15 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'With Mozilla's release of Firefox 85 on Tuesday, Adobe's once ubiquitous Flash technology is really gone for good.'
Here’s another holdout: SARS (the South African Revenue Service, which has nothing to do with Nigeria’s SARS, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, neither of which have anything to do with--never mind) <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/flash-no-longer-works-in-browsers-so-south-africa-made-its-own-browser/>. The tax department in South Africa has resorted to releasing its own custom “SARS browser” which offers a working Flash installation needed for accessing some online forms. Unfortunately this is only available for Microsoft Windows. Among other issues.
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro
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Peter Reutemann