Adobe Joins Its Critics, Tells People Not To Use Flash

After years of critics piling on top of Adobe Flash for its track record as one of the buggiest, crashiest (now a word), least secure, most vulnerable pieces of software ever to hit the web, Adobe itself is siding with its detractors (including Google, Amazon, Facebook and Firefox, etc.), and is letting everyone know they should stop using Flash. No, really.

To be clear, Adobe isn’t killing of Flash, entirely. It’ll be up to web developers what they want to use, after all.

But in a blog post last night, the company said that it will now “encourage content creators to build with new web standards,” such as HTML5, instead of Flash.

Flash, though once a great tool for creating web games and animations, has been less and less popular over the last 10 years: Flash pages and players load slowly and drain laptop batteries, and it isn’t widely supported on smartphones. It’s also been subject to a slew of security issues, making it a risky prospect for users browsing the web.

Again, Flash is here to stay — at least for now — and Adobe won’t be cutting off support for it, the company noted. Instead, it’ll be focusing on beefing up security, and changing its Flash Professional CC animation tool to a new name: Animate CC, which will be the company’s “premier web animation tool for developing HTML5 content” starting in 2016.

“While standards like HTML5 will be the web platform of the future across all devices, Flash continues to be used in key categories like web gaming and premium video, where new standards have yet to fully mature,” Adobe says. “Moving forward, Adobe is committed to working with industry partners, as we have with Microsoft and Google, to help ensure the ongoing compatibility and security of Flash content.”

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist