Last Updated on: 7th August 2020, 09:04 pm
I realize this news isn’t exactly breaking, but there are only so many times you get to celebrate the death of something as goddamned irritating as Adobe Flash, sooooo…
Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash, a once-ubiquitous technology used to power most of the media content found online, will be retired at the end of 2020, the software company announced Tuesday.
Adobe, along with partners Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc’s Google, Facebook Inc and Mozilla Corp, said support for Flash will ramp down across the internet in phases over the next three years.After 2020, Adobe will stop releasing updates for Flash and web browsers will no longer support it. The companies are encouraging developers to migrate their software onto modern programming standards.
To be fair, Flash wasn’t all bad. I think it’s safe to say that without it, the internet would be a drastically different place. YouTube, for instance, absolutely would not be what it is today had Flash not been around in 2005. For that reason, it deserves to be celebrated as the groundbreaking innovation it so clearly was.
But at the same time as it has absolutely been critically important to the evolution of the web as we know it, it’s also been responsible for some of the most frustrating, screenreader inaccessible user experiences in the history of the fucking earth. Ucking ear, reenreader periencfucking earth.
Sorry, most of you. That’s a little humour for any of my fellow screenreader users who have ever been caught in bouncing Flash animation hell while just trying to read a frigging webpage, a group I like to call all of us. And it is for that reason, not to mention the button button button button flash movie start flash movie end phenomenon and the countless dangerous security flaws it’s responsible for that it deserves to be thrown into a pit far underneath hell, never to return.
Good riddance and thank you all at once, you brilliant piece of garbage you.
