Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bsmedberg 3247 days ago
All of the browsers have published roadmap updates. Basically Flash will be disabled by default in mid-2019:

Firefox: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2017/07/25/firefox-r... and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Plugins/Roadmap Google: https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-flash... and https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/flash-roadmap Microsoft (Edge+IE): https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-wind...

1 comments

That's not "all of the browsers", that's just most of them.
The only real* browser I can think of that isn't listed there is Opera, and they're only barely hanging on. The numbers I've seen peg them at roughly 1% of desktop browsers, mostly in Europe.

*: That is, one that isn't just a reskin of another browser on the list.

How about Safari?
What they said so far is https://webkit.org/blog/7839/adobe-announces-flash-distribut...

Of course that describes what they are doing now, not their plans. Which is not surprising, because Apple never says anything about plans, as a matter of corporate policy...

Whoops, I totally didn't notice that was missing from the list.

That being said, while Apple hasn't explicitly said they plan to remove Flash from desktop Safari, they've implicitly signalled it -- they've already got features in place which make it often only load on demand.

There's not much to remove. You install Flash on macOS separately and Safari will load that in as a plugin. It seems obvious that Safari will remove that plugin functionality on or before 2020.
Safari never shipped with Flash to begin with, and Apple has regularly published metadata updates, which blacklisted old, insecure versions of flash that the user might have had installed.
Given that Safari on iOS is what set the demise of Flash into motion I don't think Apple will remain a staunch supporter :-)