As technology advances, so has improvement in web browsers. With the improvements, come new services. The days of sneaking tabs in school to play games and using media sources are counting down. This service has shaped the way one uses the internet for entertainment, but it will soon be time to say goodbye.

Do you recall the classic “Click to enable Adobe Flash Player” that always popped up when trying to play a game or watch a video? Well, this will not be appearing anymore by the end of 2020, making this the last year of using Adobe Flash Player. Although this is not new information, it may be to many people since this was announced over 3 years ago.

Adobe Flash Player is a computer software that is used to enable internet applications, view multimedia content, and for streaming audio/videos. Most every website heavily relied on Flash Player, making it an essential tool in the internet. For example, most internet games require flash player to be enabled in order to play the game first. Websites like Coolmathgames and Primary Games, popular with students, require this software to be installed.

According to Microsoft, it was announced in 2017 that Adobe Flash Player would end its support by the end of 2020. In September of 2019, Microsoft announced the official date of the shutdown which is December 31st, 2020.

Many users started to worry about the future of using YouTube, or playing online games. Don’t worry about YouTube; the company stopped using Adobe Flash Player in 2015 and switched to HTML5 video player. HTML5 is a software that is used to structure and present content on the web. As for the future of online games, it is unpredictable. There has been speculation that Coolmathgames would shut down after the software ended because of its heavy reliance on it. However, the company announced that this was false, and that they would be converting to HTML5 to run its games.

This gives hope to the web that the end of Flash Player would not make a huge impact, and that eventually all websites will switch to a different format. Browsers like Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox have announced that they will no longer support or update Flash Players after its shutdown. Furthermore, Flash player is often disabled by default now, and because of its close shutdown, one would need to click to allow Flash elements to play in the first place.

It is not confirmed that HTML5 would replace Adobe Flash Player. To be clear, there is no actual format set to replace this software at all. This is not actually worrisome considering that there are alternative formats to use like HTML5 and Javascript because of their similarities to Adobe.

It has been suggested from the software to switch to another format before its shutdown in order to avoid conflicts on websites that use it. Overall, the future of web content that was helped run by Adobe for 20 years is not necessarily threatened. New forms have been adopted and the internet will continue to prosper with this change.