WebBuilding

Events and eras

End of Adobe Flash

Summary

The end of Adobe Flash was the move, between 2010 and 2021, away from the browser plug-in used for web animation, video and games. Apple kept Flash off the iPhone, HTML5 took over its jobs, and browsers blocked it step by step after Adobe announced on July 25, 2017 that it would stop updating Flash Player at the end of 2020. Support ended on December 31, 2020, and Flash Player stopped running Flash content on January 12, 2021.

Web Building Encyclopedia · Events and eras · Last reviewed October 22, 2026 · 9 min read

What the end of Flash was

Adobe Flash was a browser plug-in: an add-on program that let a web browser play animation, video, games and interactive content that the browser could not run by itself. The end of Flash was the long move away from that plug-in, from Apple’s public refusal to put it on phones in 2010 to January 2021, when Adobe’s own software stopped playing Flash content.12

Adobe announced the end on July 25, 2017. It said it would “stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020.”3 It gave two reasons: open standards such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly had matured, and browser makers were building the plug-in’s abilities into their browsers.3

Adobe stopped supporting Flash Player on December 31, 2020, and blocked Flash content from running in Flash Player from January 12, 2021. It tells everyone who still has Flash Player to uninstall it.2

The decline was already well under way by 2017. On the day of Adobe’s announcement, Google said that three years earlier 80% of desktop Chrome users had visited a site with Flash each day, and that the share had fallen to 17%.4

The story has four parts: phones that never ran Flash, web standards that took over its jobs, browsers that phased it out step by step, and the work of keeping old Flash content playable. The product’s own history and uses are covered in the Adobe Flash entry.

Phones without Flash (2010 to 2012)

The iPhone never supported Flash, and neither did the iPad or the iPod touch, Apple’s WebKit team later wrote.5 WebKit is the engine behind Apple’s Safari browser.

On April 29, 2010, Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, published an open letter on Apple’s website titled “Thoughts on Flash.”6 His main points, as reported at the time, were these:1

  • Openness. Flash was proprietary and controlled by Adobe alone, while Apple backed HTML5, CSS and JavaScript.1
  • Video. Almost all the web video that Adobe said iPhone users were missing was also available in H.264, a video format Apple’s devices could play.1
  • Reliability and security. Jobs cited a Symantec report that gave Flash one of the worst security records of 2009, and wrote that Flash was “the number one reason Macs crash.”6
  • Battery life. Video decoded by an iPhone’s hardware played for up to 10 hours, against less than 5 hours when decoded in software.16
  • Touch. Flash had been designed for mice. Many Flash sites relied on rollovers, effects that appear when a pointer hovers over something, and a touch screen has no hover.1
  • Third-party layers. Jobs called this the most important reason: a tool sitting between developers and the platform held back the platform’s own new features.1

The same year, Apple stopped shipping Flash preinstalled on the Mac.5

Adobe kept making Flash Player for other phones, mainly Android devices, for another year and a half. On November 9, 2011, it said it would stop developing Flash Player for mobile browsers after version 11.1 and invest more in HTML5. Flash developers could still package their work as apps for app stores using Adobe AIR.7 The same report said Adobe planned to cut about 750 jobs in North America and Europe.7

The end on Android followed in 2012. Adobe said it would not build Flash Player for Android 4.1, known as Jelly Bean, and that devices without Flash Player already installed could not install it from the Google Play store after August 15, 2012.8

HTML5 takes over video, ads and animation (2014 to 2016)

By the mid-2010s, much of what Flash did on websites could be done with web standards. The W3C published HTML5 as a Recommendation, its name for a finished standard, on October 28, 2014.9

Two HTML elements took over Flash’s main jobs. The video element embeds a media player in a page. The canvas element gives scripts a surface to draw graphics and animation on, through the canvas scripting API or through WebGL for 3D graphics. MDN Web Docs reports both as working across browsers since July 2015.1011

  • Video. In January 2015, YouTube made its HTML5 player the default in browsers that supported it, naming Chrome, Internet Explorer 11, Safari 8 and beta versions of Firefox, and kept Flash only for older browsers.12 YouTube engineering manager Richard Leider said adaptive bitrate streaming, which lowers video quality when a network is busy, had cut buffering by more than 50% worldwide.12
  • Plug-in throttling. Google’s Chrome roadmap lists a Plugin Power Savings Mode as shipped with Chrome 42 in September 2015.13 Google later said that making some Flash content click-to-play in this way had improved page load times and battery life.14
  • Animation tools. On November 30, 2015, Adobe announced that its Flash Professional authoring program would become Animate CC in early 2016, presented as a tool for HTML5 content that would still support creating Flash content.15
  • Advertising. In February 2016, Google said its Google Display Network and DoubleClick Digital Marketing were “going 100% HTML5.” New Flash ads could not be uploaded from June 30, 2016, and Flash ads stopped running on January 2, 2017.16
  • Background Flash. On August 9, 2016, Google wrote that more than 90% of Flash on the web loaded behind the scenes, mostly for page analytics, and slowed pages down. It said Chrome 53, in September 2016, would block that content, and Chrome 55, in December 2016, would make HTML5 the default, asking users before running Flash on sites that offered nothing else.14

Google’s roadmap records how that last step rolled out: HTML5 by default reached 1% of Chrome 55 users in December 2016 and all users with Chrome 56 in February 2017.13

Mozilla made similar changes. It said that from August 2016 Firefox would block some Flash content that was not essential to the page, and that in 2017 Firefox would require users to approve Flash before a site could run it.17

The 2017 announcement and the browser timelines

Adobe’s July 25, 2017 announcement named Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla as the companies it would keep working with on Flash security and compatibility until the end.3 Each published its own plan the same day.

CompanySteps announced on July 25, 2017Final step
Google (Chrome)Ask permission to run Flash in more situations, then disable it by defaultRemove Flash from Chrome completely toward the end of 20204
Mozilla (Firefox)Users choose which sites may run Flash from August 2017; Flash disabled by default for most users in 2019No version of Firefox loads the plug-in once Adobe’s security patches stop at the end of 2020; Extended Support Release users keep Flash until then18
Microsoft (Edge and Internet Explorer)Edge asks per site, then per session from mid to late 2018; Flash disabled by default in both browsers in mid to late 2019Ability to run Flash removed from both by the end of 202019
Apple (Safari)Flash already off by default when a user installs it, with explicit approval needed on each websiteWork with Adobe and developers on the move away from Flash by the end of 20205
Facebook (games)Flash games keep running on Facebook; new games should use open web standardsFlash games run until the end of 2020, but developers are urged to follow the browsers’ earlier timelines20

Facebook’s plan mattered because many browser games ran on its platform. It said more than 200 HTML5 games were already live there, and that it was working with Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and the game engine maker Unity on a path for moving Flash games.20

WebAssembly, one of the standards Adobe named, is a portable, low-level code format designed to run efficiently and safely, including in web browsers.21 The W3C made its core specification a Recommendation on December 5, 2019, calling WebAssembly the fourth language for the web after HTML, CSS and JavaScript.21

Off by default, then gone (2019 to 2021)

The browser plans were carried out largely as announced. Chrome 76, released on July 30, 2019, disabled Flash by default.132223 Google noted later that year that Firefox 69 also disabled Flash by default.23

Search followed. In October 2019, Google said Google Search would stop supporting Flash later that year: it would ignore Flash content inside web pages and stop indexing standalone SWF files, the files that held Flash content.23

Apple removed Flash from its browser months before the other major browser makers. Safari 14, released on September 16, 2020, lists one removed feature in its release notes: “Safari no longer supports Flash.”24

Adobe’s support ended on December 31, 2020. From January 12, 2021, Flash Player itself refused to run Flash content. Adobe also removed its Flash Player download pages and warned that unofficial copies are a common source of malware and viruses.2

The other browsers removed Flash the same month:

  • Chrome. Google’s roadmap set Chrome 88 as the release that would remove Flash support, and set January 2021 for blocking Flash Player as out of date in all Chrome versions.13 Chrome 88 reached the stable channel on January 19, 2021.25
  • Firefox. Firefox 84 was the last version to support Flash. Firefox 85, released on January 26, 2021, shipped without it, and there is no setting to turn it back on.2627
  • Microsoft. Microsoft said Flash would be removed from the new Microsoft Edge by January 2021, and disabled by default in Internet Explorer 11 and the older Edge from January 2021. A Windows update numbered KB4577586 removes Flash Player permanently, and Microsoft began including it in Windows 10 preview updates in June 2021 and in regular Windows updates from July 2021.28

Two groups could keep using Flash after 2020 under Adobe’s own arrangements. Enterprise customers that still needed Flash Player after 2020 were directed to HARMAN, Adobe’s official distribution licensing partner, for licensing or help moving content to other technologies. In mainland China only, a company called Chongqing Zhongcheng Network Technology was named to distribute and maintain Flash Player beyond 2020.29

Keeping Flash content playable

The end of Flash Player left years of animations and games without an official way to play them. The main preservation projects use WebAssembly, so visitors need no plug-in.

  • Ruffle is an open-source Flash Player emulator, a program that imitates Flash Player, written in the Rust programming language. It runs on desktop computers and, through WebAssembly, in web browsers, under the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses.30 Its compatibility page, as of October 2026, rates its support for ActionScript 1 and 2, Flash’s older scripting languages, at 99% of the language and 82% of the programming interface, and for ActionScript 3 at 90% and 82%.31
  • The Internet Archive began emulating Flash animations, games and toys on November 19, 2020, using Ruffle. Its Flash software collection held more than 1,000 items at the launch.32
  • Flashpoint Archive, a community project started in December 2017, says it has preserved more than 200,000 web games, animations and other interactive works built with more than a hundred technologies, Flash among them.33

Flash has not vanished from web pages. As of October 22, 2026, W3Techs detects Flash on 2.8% of all websites, against JavaScript on 98.9%.34 Current browsers no longer load Flash Player, so that content does not play unless the site adds an emulator.230

Adobe’s authoring tool has also slowed. As of June 2026, Adobe lists Animate, the former Flash Professional, as in maintenance mode: it gets security and bug fixes but no new features, and stays available to new and existing users.3515

Timeline

  1. Firefox 85 ships without Flash support26
  2. Chrome 88, the first version without Flash, reaches the stable channel25
  3. Adobe blocks Flash content from running in Flash Player2
  4. Adobe ends support for Flash Player2
  5. The Internet Archive starts emulating Flash with Ruffle32
  6. Safari 14 is released without Flash support24
  7. Chrome 76 disables Flash by default22
  8. Adobe announces it will stop updating and distributing Flash Player at the end of 20203
  9. Flash ads stop running on the Google Display Network and DoubleClick16
  10. Google says Chrome will de-emphasize Flash in favor of HTML514
  11. Adobe announces Flash Professional will be renamed Animate CC15
  12. YouTube makes its HTML5 player the default12
  13. Flash Player can no longer be installed from Google Play on new devices8
  14. Adobe stops developing Flash Player for mobile browsers7
  15. Steve Jobs publishes "Thoughts on Flash"6

What it means for your website

Every current major browser has dropped Flash, so any Flash still on a website shows nothing to any visitor.241326 On a hosted website builder the platform handles this for you. On an older self-built or agency-built site, it is worth checking.

  • Look for leftovers. Old sites can still carry Flash intros, menus, banners or video players. Search the site’s files and page source for “.swf”, the Flash file extension. Pages built before 2015, when YouTube moved to HTML5 video, are the ones to check first.12
  • Replace video with HTML5 video. Use the video element or an embedded player from a video service.10
  • Rebuild animation with web standards. Apple’s WebKit team names canvas, WebGL and CSS transitions and animations among the standards that replace plug-in content.511 If you still have the original FLA source files, Adobe Animate can convert an ActionScript 3 document into an HTML5 Canvas document. ActionScript components are removed and ActionScript code is commented out, as are 3D transformations and video, so interactivity has to be added again in JavaScript.36
  • Use an emulator for archive content. If old games or animations matter to your audience, Ruffle can play many of them in the browser without a plug-in.3031
  • Never ask visitors to install Flash. Adobe removed its download pages and warns that third-party copies are a common source of malware.2
  • Do not rely on Flash for search. Google Search ignores Flash content in web pages.23

Removing old plug-in content is often part of a bigger update. Our guide to whether you should update, redesign or rebuild your website and the redesign checklist cover what to save first, and the glossary explains responsive design, the way most sites now fit phones and desktops alike.

See also

References

  1. Steve Jobs Shares His Thoughts On Flash. Ian Paul, PCWorld. 2010-04-29. accessed October 22, 2026.
  2. Adobe Flash Player End of Life. Adobe. 2021-01-13. accessed October 22, 2026.
  3. Flash & the Future of Interactive Content. Adobe Communications Team, Adobe Blog. 2017-07-25. accessed October 22, 2026.
  4. Saying goodbye to Flash in Chrome. Anthony Laforge, The Keyword, Google. 2017-07-25. accessed October 22, 2026.
  5. Next Steps for Legacy Plug-ins. WebKit Team, WebKit Blog, Apple. 2017-07-25. accessed October 22, 2026.
  6. Steve Jobs slams Adobe Flash as unfit for modern era. AppleInsider Staff, AppleInsider. 2010-04-29. accessed October 22, 2026.
  7. Adobe halts Flash Player development for mobile browsers. Mike Rose, Game Developer. 2011-11-09. accessed October 22, 2026.
  8. Android Jelly Bean won't get Flash Player. Brid-Aine Parnell, The Register. 2012-06-29. accessed October 22, 2026.
  9. HTML5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML (W3C Recommendation). World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). 2014-10-28. accessed October 22, 2026.
  10. <video> HTML video embed element. MDN Web Docs, Mozilla. accessed October 22, 2026.
  11. <canvas> HTML graphics canvas element. MDN Web Docs, Mozilla. accessed October 22, 2026.
  12. YouTube Switches to HTML5 Video Player. David Iffland, InfoQ. 2015-01-29. accessed October 22, 2026.
  13. Flash Roadmap. The Chromium Projects. accessed October 22, 2026.
  14. Flash and Chrome. Anthony Laforge, The Keyword, Google. 2016-08-09. accessed October 22, 2026.
  15. Flash, HTML5 and Open Web Standards. Adobe Corporate Communications, Adobe Blog. 2015-11-30. accessed October 22, 2026.
  16. Google Drops Flash to go 100% HTML5 for Ads. James Chesters, InfoQ. 2016-02-13. accessed October 22, 2026.
  17. Reducing Adobe Flash Usage in Firefox. Future Releases Blog, Mozilla. 2016-07-20. accessed October 22, 2026.
  18. Firefox Roadmap for Flash End-of-Life. Future Releases Blog, Mozilla. 2017-07-25. accessed October 22, 2026.
  19. Flash on Windows Timeline. John Hazen, Microsoft Edge Blog, Microsoft. 2017-07-25. accessed October 22, 2026.
  20. Games Migration to Open Web Standards. Jakub Pudełek, Meta for Developers. 2017-07-25. accessed October 22, 2026.
  21. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) brings a new language to the Web as WebAssembly becomes a W3C Recommendation. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). 2019-12-05. accessed October 22, 2026.
  22. Stable Channel Update for Desktop (Chrome 76). Chrome Releases, Google. 2019-07-30. accessed October 22, 2026.
  23. Goodbye, Flash. Google Search Central Blog, Google. 2019-10-28. accessed October 22, 2026.
  24. Safari 14 Release Notes. Apple Developer Documentation, Apple. 2020-09-16. accessed October 22, 2026.
  25. Stable Channel Update for Desktop (Chrome 88). Chrome Releases, Google. 2021-01-19. accessed October 22, 2026.
  26. End of support for Adobe Flash. Mozilla Support. accessed October 22, 2026.
  27. Ending Firefox support for Flash. Future Releases Blog, Mozilla. 2020-11-17. accessed October 22, 2026.
  28. Update on Adobe Flash Player End of Support. Microsoft Edge Blog, Microsoft. 2020-09-04. accessed October 22, 2026.
  29. Update on Flash Player EOL. Milind Kumar Jha, Adobe Community. 2021-04-16. accessed October 22, 2026.
  30. Ruffle. Ruffle project. accessed October 22, 2026.
  31. Ruffle compatibility. Ruffle project. accessed October 22, 2026.
  32. Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive. Jason Scott, Internet Archive Blogs. 2020-11-19. accessed October 22, 2026.
  33. Flashpoint Archive. Flashpoint Archive. accessed October 22, 2026.
  34. Usage statistics of client-side programming languages for websites, October 2026. W3Techs. 2026-10-22. accessed October 22, 2026.
  35. Adobe Animate maintenance mode FAQs. Adobe Help Center. 2026-06-08. accessed October 22, 2026.
  36. Create and publish HTML5 Canvas documents in Animate. Adobe Help Center. accessed October 22, 2026.

Web Building Encyclopedia. First published October 22, 2026. Last reviewed October 22, 2026. Every fact on this page is linked to a source we opened. Spotted an error? Write to [email protected].