06 Feb Time to die: Let’s resolve to get eid of Flash already
Adobe Flash, the standard that animated the early Web, is going the way of the dinosaurs—even YouTube has now transitioned to HTML 5. And its already battered reputation has taken further hits this year thanks to three serious security vulnerabilities that have emerged in just the past two weeks.
Enough is enough. It’s time for Web users to wean themselves of their lingering attachment to this buggy, outdated software … and uninstall Flash.
True, not everyone’s going to be able to make the jump right away. Some internal corporate applications still require Flash; some websites still cling to it. But for your own safety, and for the good of the Web, you should make the effort.
Time To Say Goodbye
ReadWrite has cheered Flash’s impending doom since 2012. But no one makes the case better than the anonymous writers of the great Occupy Flash site write:
Flash Player is dead. Its time has passed. It’s buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates. It doesn’t work on most mobile devices. It’s a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of Web technology. Websites that rely on Flash present a completely inconsistent (and often unusable) experience for fast-growing percentage of the users who don’t use a desktop browser. It introduces some scary security and privacy issues by way of Flash cookies.
They’re not kidding about Flash’s security vulnerabilities. The recent discoveries all involve so-called zero-day exploits, in which malicious hackers use or distribute tools that take advantage of previously undiscovered security flaws.