Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash media player helped usher in the multimedia revolution on the Internet, but the software platform has fallen onto hard times over the last few years. The proprietary nature of Flash and its long line of security problems have led to a mass exodus from the platform, and everyone from Google Inc. to Twitch to Pornhub have been moving from Flash to the newer, more open HTML5.

Even Adobe dropped support for mobile devices in 2011, and now the company has finally decided to officially kill off – sorry, “deprecate” – Flash by 2020.

“Specifically, 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,” Adobe said in a statement.

Adobe said that it is collaborating with several major tech partners to phase out Flash, including Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Google, Microsoft Corp. and browser maker Mozilla. According to Adobe, it will work with its partners to help companies that rely on Flash to migrate to a different platform. For example, Facebook has offered training resources to help game developers migrate their games to other platforms such as WebGL.

Several of Adobe’s migration partners took the time to recognize Flash’s place in Internet history. Anthony Laforge, a product manager for Google Chrome, praised how Flash “helped shape the way that you play games, watch videos and run applications on the web,” and the Microsoft Edge team called the deprecation of Flash “the end of an era.”

Mozilla’s Benjamin Smedberg, who is the architect for the Firefox product integrity team, also praised Flash’s role in helping to “bring the Web to greatness with innovations in media and animation.” But he also said that the end of Flash is an opportunity for developers to “bring legacy design and content in the Flash format into an new era using HTML and web technologies.”

Famously, however, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs hated Flash and didn’t allow it on iOS devices such as the iPhone.

Adobe is also shifting its focus to HTML5, and the company said in a statement that it will “remain at the forefront of leading the development of new web standards and actively participate in their advancement.”

Although Adobe will be officially ending Flash support in 2020, other programs will be ditching Flash much sooner. For example, in 2018 Microsoft Edge will require users to give Flash permission to run during each session, and the browser will disable Flash by default in 2019. Mozilla Firefox will also disable Flash in 2019, and Firefox users will have to individually approve websites to use Flash starting next month. Google Chrome already require users to allow Flash to run with each instance.

Photo: Adobe