Video content has become so standard in every aspect of the digital world, from news to sports to commercial videos for business and many more examples of where you’ve been able to watch video from your computer or smartphone over the last nearly 20 years in much the same way you were only able to do so with a TV prior to that. Behind that capability was Adobe, and their much-heralded and long-ubiquitous Flash plug-in multimedia player. It’s been a staple for pretty much every device since it emerged in the late 1990s, but now it seems it seems its working life is drawing to a close. Here at 4GoodHosting, we take pride in being a top Canadian web hosting provider and we believe that a small part of what gives us that distinction is in being in touch with all the reaches of the industry within which we operate. Given that dynamic multimedia content delivery is an important component of many of the websites we host, we feel this is a relevant topic for our blog this week. Adobe has announced that it will stop updating and distributing Flash by the end of 2020. That’s right, the 2-decade long reign of the most commonplace media player will finally come to an end. Until that time, Adobe will continue to partner with Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Google to offer security updates - including patches - in their browsers but no new Flash features will be forthcoming. The 20 year run as the undisputed ‘go-to’ guy for video within web browsers has been an impressive one, but one can’t deny that Flash and its more outdated versions have become prime targets for hackers because of the extent of its distribution and inherent security vulnerabilities which unfortunately allowed intrusion far too easily very often. Flash’s Legacy As mentioned, Flash emerged in the late 1990s, and its popularity was firmly cemented with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer becoming the default browser in Windows. Quickly leaving low resolution GIFs or blinking text behind, Flash allowed designers and developers to make web-based video, and animated, interactive content that could play on any computer or within any browser....
