What will Flash Player EOL mean to me?

Question

I got the notification about Flash Player being discontinued. I'm not computer savvy-enough to understand what will happen.  Does this only affect games or does it affect other things?  How would I know what files in the computer require Flash Player or are stored as Flash Player files?  What would I do to switch such files to some other format so they can be viewed/saved?

jeromiec83223024 · Accepted Answer

In all likelihood, you probably won't notice. The work here needed to be done by the publishers of the content you consume.

Here's the original announcement from 2017:

https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash-update/

Here's the consumer FAQ:

https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/end-of-life.html

DeanUtian · Answer

Hi Richard,I'll give a short history to give context to your question.The early days of the web (HTML pages) could not show multimedia/range of digital media content without a plugin. Flash was developed to be an efficient way for multimedia to be put online and it became a standard web format, evolving to allow more complex interactive content and games. It required the Flash plugin/player for browser to display the content. The web evolved and HTML5 became a standard. HTML5 allows things like video, animation and even games without the need for browser plugins. Plugins were seen as problematic from an efficiency side (particularly on mobile devices - iPhone did not support it) and for security reasons. This resulted in the decline of Flash, primarily replaced by HTML5, and Adobe moved away from the product. As others have said on here, the decision by Adobe to discontinue development and support of Flash was made some time back, giving people who had developed with Flash time to convert their work into a format that would be supported in the future. Some developers have decided not to invest the time in updating their content.How does that impact you? Well, if you go to an old site that still has Flash content, you won't be able to view it. However, if you say go to current games sites or other places that keep up to date, they would have moved on from Flash and you would not be restricted in any way. You don't need to do any 'switching of files' to view things differently. What you would do is visit sites that load and don't give any error messages.  If you are getting an error from any site, it is probably not worth staying there as it could be potentially unsafe.Hope that clarifies thigs for you.

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