It was back in 2017 that Adobe first announced its plan to kill Flash. This was followed by other companies in stopping their support to the technology.
Google for example, stopped supporting Flash on Chrome in 2019. As a result, many Flash-powered apps cease to exist, including the insanely popular FarmVille game from Zynga.
Then in October in a one big blow, Microsoft released an update to finally disable Flash on Windows.
And finally, as 2020 ends, Adobe pulls the plug on the once loveable product.
Support for Flash officially ended on December 31, 2020, as Adobe effectively killed it.
According to Adobe on its web page:
"Some users may continue to see reminders from Adobe to uninstall Flash Player from their system. See below for more details on how to uninstall Flash Player."
With Adobe officially killing the technology and other companies no longer supporting Flash Player, apps that are Flash-based should be useless.
This essentially makes Flash the iconic functionality of the old internet, a relic that shall always be remembered.
With the web plugin now gone, it will be remembered for its golden era of animated internet memes and the endless security problems that have all led to its demise.
Fortunately for most people on the web, they might not even feel the absence of Flash, as most popular Flash-based apps and services have started adopting the newer technologies like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly.
But as for FarmVille, Zynga decided to shut down the popular Facebook game that heavily promoted the use of Flash, as founder Mark Pincus has tweeted.
Tomorrow, Zynga shuts down FarmVille on Facebook after 11 years. I wanted to share the story of how we created it and why it has played such an important role in the evolution of gaming. 1/x
— mark pincus (@markpinc) December 31, 2020
Flash was a web plugin that allowed users to view multimedia contents, executing rich internet apps, and more.
Originally developed by Macromedia in 1996 before Adobe acquired the company in 2005, Flash Player can run from a web browser as a browser plugin or on supported mobile devices.
It was also a common format for web games, animations, and graphical user interface (GUI) elements on web pages.
According to Adobe back 2013, Flash had more than 400 million out of more than 1 billion connected desktops, all of which were updated within six week of release.
But gone are those days.
In the modern world of internet and mobile devices, Flash has been increasingly criticized for its performance, battery consumption, multiple security vulnerabilities, and more.
It was so painstakingly difficult to deal with Flash that even the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was critical to Flash, saying that iOS wasn't going to support Flash.
According to Adobe, Flash had more than 1.3 billion users across web browsers and operating systems, or 11 times more users than the bestselling hardware game console. 2.2% of the top 10 million websites were using Flash, as of December 31, according to Web Technology Surveys, a site that tracks the top 10 million websites in the world.