What is FLASH?
Well, I’m glad you asked. Flash is or more to the point was, a popular creative software program developed by Macromedia, which was on-sold to Adobe. It is used to create graphics-based animation programs with full-screen navigation interfaces, graphic illustrations and provided enhanced usability for many great websites.
The problem with Flash
For a long time, Adobe’s Flash Player was one of the most widely used browser plugins on the internet. Flash was used for animation; web games and entire websites, which were all powered by Flash. At one point in time, even Google’s own YouTube used it as their main software for their video player. As time went on, Flash had some major security issues that were and still are incredibly easy to take advantage of. Flash became notoriously known as an entry point for many security breaches.
Due to the immense security holes that Flash presented, it was an easy target for malicious software attacks. Adobe then started to phase out the support for this unsecure software. Adobe will officially be stopping all support for any Flash Player after 2020 and will not be releasing any further updates. Browser vendors such as Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox have been slowly phasing out the support for Flash with every new update to their browser.
The End is Upon Us..
With the release of Chrome 76 (July 2019) – all Adobe Flash content was disabled by default. Only by diving deep into the settings of Chrome, would allow certain websites to play Flash content, thus affecting iOnline clients’ whose websites are powered by ICMS, creating havoc on file manager which is reliant on Adobe Flash.
Flash hasn’t completely gone yet, but it is important to reiterate: “Flash will no longer be supported after December 2020”. This message will start to appear on websites that do use Flash. Mozilla Firefox will be even more aggressive: it will entirely remove any Flash support in early 2020.
What to do if your website uses Flash:
As Flash will be outdated and unsupported software it is important to remember that any major browser vendors will no longer support Flash. If your website relies on Flash, then it is really time to consider moving your website to newer technology such as WordPress platform. WordPress is fully supported and maintained regularly.
Here at iOnline we are running regular promotions and discounted updates for any of our clients who use the old ICMS Flash-based web platform.
