> “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats,”

Does that mean existing Flash content, say old Flash games, will break at said date? Or just that there will be no more updates to Flash to any new content? After reading this, it's not 100% clear.

It goes on to say:

> A number of gaming, education, and video sites still use Flash, and Adobe says it remains committed to supporting the technology until 2020 alongside partners like Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla.

But that seems like that doesn't align with their quoted statement of just stopping updates/distribution?

Can anyone clarify?

It does mostly mean that existing Flash content like old Flash games breaks at that date.

Stopping distribution means that Adobe will no longer host official Flash Player plugins for download at all, meaning that old Flash games that try to helpfully auto-install the Flash player for you will fail as those links will go dark. Presumably archive sites may preserve installers to manually install the Flash Player after the 2020 shutdown date, but that will be an increased amount of effort that will make it less likely people will do it.

Stopping updates particularly means security updates, which is an increasing reason for the ongoing maintenance of the Flash Player. That will add an increased reason for people to avoid manually installing the Flash Player as it will be an increasing security liability.

Most browsers are already on the path to disabling the sorts of plugin APIs that Flash Player has used for security footprint reasons alone. When the Flash Player no longer receives official security updates, the browsers will have increased reason to eliminate that risk, and disable those APIs for good. That means that a manual install of the Flash player will be increasingly unlikely to even work soon after the shutdown date. Most browsers have already been planning to disable such APIs and break such plugins near or around the date Adobe has given already, so this process has largely already started.

Flash content and old Flash games are going to break. The web will be a little bit different at that date.

I personally don't have flash installed on my main browser and I haven't seen it in .... months? over a year now?

It comes bundled with chrome.

Thanks for clarifying! Darn, that's quite a bummer then. I understand not supporting it anymore, but it'll be sad to see that old stuff just break on that date.

This article dates from 2017. I was hoping to see a more recent status report.

Any idea on what Adobe is currently up to in order to move this along?

Is there any program like Macromedia Flash that made it so easy and fun to create animations and user-interactive content? I haven't done work like that since it was Macromedia Flash so I have no idea how close other Adobe products come or what other options there are.

But there was something magic about those vector graphics, keyframes and the really fast ways of creating interactive content. Is there like an HTML5 animation/game studio or something?

Flash as a content-creation platform is still around, albeit now renamed "Adobe Animate". What's being killed is the format and plugin player, the content-creation tools now support open formats like HTML5 Canvas w/ JS/WASM.

Wow, A thousand thanks for this.

Another one of those Discover and Distribution problem I encounter. How can I not know this exist.

Oh my gosh thank you for that. I will check it out!