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      Adobe Flash Player End of Support in Popular Browsers

      Adobe Flash Player End of Support in Popular Browsers

      The Issue

      Adobe Flash Player is being removed from all major browsers by the end of 2020.  Over the past few years, Adobe and the major browser companies have been phasing out support for flash player. The plan by Adobe and the major browser companies, Google, Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft is to have no flash players in their browsers by the end of 2020. This article provides information on the current status of flash support in browsers and summarizes the plans by these companies to complete this phase out. We also will talk about best practices to ensure any courses you create with the various eLearning Brothers authoring tools will continue to be functional as this access to flash player goes away.

      Beginning of the End for Flash – First Adobe Announcement and announced plans for each browser

      In July 2017, Adobe and the major browser companies announced that it was time to say goodbye to Flash Player due to the majority of website migrating to open web technologies which are faster, more secure and more power efficient than Adobe Flash Player. The plans announced were to gradually phase out flash player and end all support by the end of 2020.

      Below are links to the major announcements about end of support for Adobe Flash Player by Adobe, Google (Chrome), Mozilla (Firefox), Microsoft (IE and Edge) and Apple (Safari).

      Current Status and road map – Where is each browser now and their announced next milestones

      Adobe

      1. Flash player is still available at adobe.com and is being updated with security updates during 2020.
      2. Adobe will stop shipping security updates for Flash at the end of 2020.

      Google Chrome

      Support for Flash Player in Chrome will end in December 2020. As of this article, flash player is still pre-installed in Google Chrome, but is not enabled.

      1. Flash Players is pre-installed in Google Chrome, but is disabled by default. See Enable Flash Player on Google Chrome.
      2. Inside Chrome you get a message that says “Flash Player will no longer be supported after December 2020. The user has a button they can click to “Turn off” this message.
      3. Chrome will prompt you when you open a page that requires FLASH
      4. Customers can use flash by enabling it within Chrome.

      Mozilla Firefox

      1. Firefox sill includes Flash Player but it is disabled. Since September 2019, Firefox version 69 removes the “Always Activate” Flash Option.
      2. Firefox will always ask the user for permission before activating Flash on a website.
      3. In December 2020, Flash support will be completely removed from consumer versions of Firefox.

      Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge

      In August 2019, Microsoft updated their status with this Update on removing Flash from Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer.

      Apple Safari

      1. Apple is removing support for Adobe Flash player in Safari in an upcoming version. As of January 2020, Safari Technology Preview 99has no support for Flash player. Which means removal of support is being tested, and then will be rolled into a production release of Safari later this year.Apple has announced it will stop distributing and updating Flash Player at the end of 2020.
      2. Mac Safari requires explicit approval on each website before running the Flash plugin.
      3. Apple iOS devices never supported Flash Player
      4. Mac Safari started transitioning away from Flash in 2010 by removing the pre-install of Flash.

      Adobe Flash player Availability

      Adobe will still allow people to download the flash player, they just won’t support or provide service updates after December 31, 2020.

      Lectora and CenarioVR users: Removing dependencies on flash player in eLearning Brothers tools; Lectora, Lectora Online, CenarioVR

      From the beginning over 20 years ago, Lectora has offered audio media playback without the use of Flash Player. As soon as video playing standards solidifed in the years leading up to Netflix starting to stream, Lectora provided video players without Adobe Flash. For the past two major releases, Lectora has the feature to publish without any flash components being placed in the package. When publishing your courses you can choose to publish your course with no flash players. Instructions to Publish without flash player located here. To remove all dependencies on Flash players for media files, make sure you publish your courses without flash player loaded, using all HTML5 players.

      Course authors should check your courses for flash objects. For example, games, animations of other objects. Lectora makes it easy to find these objects, just open your title and go to the Resource Manager.

      You can find the Resource manager on the Tools menu in the section “Manage”. Click on the Red toolbox icon labeled “Resources”. In the left window, click on the “All” tab and then look at the section “Flash Activities”. If there are flash objects in your title, there will be a plus (+) sign next to the Flash Activities label. Clicking on the plus buttons will show a list of the flash objects in the title. When you click on each object, more detail will show up on the right side, with information like name, a list of where this Resources is Used, and a preview of the resource. You will need to remove or replace each object so your users do not get errors when their browser stops supporting flash player.

      This article last reviewed Dec, 2015. The software may have changed since the last review. Please visit our Release Notes to learn more about version updates.