You can’t deny that Adobe Flash was incredibly important in the early days of the modern Internet when multimedia was starting to become much more common in web browsers. Unfortunately, you also can’t deny that the dated technology is not only no longer necessary, but more often than not proves to be an incredibly dangerous tool for hackers to use to exploit and gain access to private data. Even Adobe’s impressive patch speed isn’t enough to stop these exploits, which is why is about time we just let Flash die.
I won’t pretend to be Steve Jobs—I don’t even own a mock turtleneck—but I have to repeat his words from April 2010: “Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content.” Flash is a constantly exploited, superannuated bit of technology that useful in the early days of multimedia in web browsers, and now deserves to die. When Jobs wrote “Thoughts on Flash” over five years ago, it was in response to the notion that Flash should be available on iOS. At the time, I asked repeatedly for Adobe to stage demonstrations in private using iOS development tools to show Flash running. They never took me up on it, or any other writer that I’m aware of, even though they had the ability. Flash for Android, when it appeared, was terrible. Within two years, it was dead. Yesterday, Mozilla set Firefox and Google set Chrome to block every version of Flash, allowing only new versions to run. Adobe patched and released yet another update today that Firefox will accept—provisionally, as it’s possible not all known exploits are fixed. This was Adobe’s third critical release in three weeks. This was due largely to previously unreleased or “zero-day” exploits in Flash discovered in the data breach from security firm Hacking Team. But Adobe routinely releases fixes for both not-yet-known and zero-day flaws.