The change will reach users next month and in September. "Users will have the choice to remember the Flash setting per-site," said Mozilla in its roadmap. But rather than be told what sites can use Flash, Firefox users get to choose the websites allowed to activate Flash. 8 Mozilla will release Firefox 55, which will start the end-game process of erasing Flash. What does Mozilla plan for Firefox? If you've heard this story, stop us. Then, around December 2020 (with Chrome 87), Google will remove all Flash capabilities from its browser, ending a 12-year symbiotic relationship with Adobe's app. However, users will be able to switch on Flash in the Settings screen.
That user approval must be given after each browser restart.Ī year later - in July 2019 and with Chrome 76 - Flash will be disabled by default, even for sites like YouTube and Facebook.
Since late last year, Chrome has had Flash off by default, and has limited its use to 10 websites - Amazon, Facebook, YouTube and others - and then only after user approval.Īccording to the Flash roadmap posted on the Chromium website - Chromium is the open-source project that feeds code to Chrome itself - around July 2018 (and with the debut of Chrome 66), sites that continue to use Flash will require explicit user okay to show that content. How does Google plan to kill Flash in Chrome? Like Microsoft, Google will take it one step at a time.
14, 2020 - the retirement date for Windows 7 - IE will be supported only in Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.)
"Users will no longer have any ability to enable or run Flash," said John Hazen, a program manager on the Edge team, in a post to a company blog. Edge will require site-by-site authorization.īy the end of 2020, Flash will be barred from running in Edge or IE. Users will have to manually re-enable Flash in both to view content. No change to IE.Īt the mid-to-late 2019 mark, both Edge and IE will default to a disabled Flash state. In "mid to late 2018," Edge will be updated so that it requires user authorization for each Flash session. (That click-to-run functionality only made it into Edge in March, when Microsoft launched Windows 10's 1703, aka "Creators Update.) Internet Explorer (IE) will allow Flash in all circumstances, as it does now, with no limitation. How will Microsoft dead-end Flash in Edge and Internet Explorer? Redmond plans a four-step death for Adobe's once-a-kingpin technology.Ĭontinuing through the rest of this year and into 2018, Edge will ask permission to run Flash "for most sites" the first time that website is visited.
Each of the top four browser makers - Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla - have, to greater or lesser degrees, explained how they're going to sunset Flash.Īnd maybe, just maybe, take one last lunge at that piñata. (Or as Hilwa put it in 2011, "Nothing lives forever.")īecause browsers have been the primary delivery vehicle for Flash content, how they handle the plug-in's demise will be important to users and content creators alike.
Nearly six years ago, just after Adobe declared that it was halting Flash Player development for mobile browsers, Al Hilwa of Gartner predicted that Flash would "continue until 2014 or 2015, depending on how Windows 8 takes off and how touch-based interfaces compete against traditional desktop interfaces."īut the end will come.
The end-of-the-line date is farther to the right on the timeline than one expert expected. The long lead time, the company contended, will give content makers time to complete the transition to Web standards, like HTML5 and WebGL. "We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020," Adobe said in a post to its primary blog. So will end a technology that, in many ways, made the Web - even as users, security experts and browser makers took turns whacking it like a piñata at a six-year-old's birthday party. Last week, Adobe announced it would dig a deep hole for its Flash Player, drop in the plug-in, and cover it with dirt by the end of 2020.