Google reports that Flash Usage Declines from 80% in 2014 to Under 8% Today
The percentage of daily Chrome users who’ve loaded at least one page containing Flash content per day has gone down from around 80% in 2014 to under 8% in early 2018.
These statistics on Flash’s declining numbers were shared with the public by Parisa Tabriz, Director of Engineering at Google, during a keynote speech at Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) which was held recently in San Diego.
Flash’s demise was to be expected, though. Adobe announced last year plans to stop supporting the Adobe Flash Media Player by the end of 2020. But while Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and all major browsers have already moved from a Flash-enabled-by-default to a Flash-click-to-play policy since last year, the massive drop in Flash usage numbers is a huge surprise for most industry experts.
This big drop could, at least in theory, be explained by the fact that most advertising networks and video streaming portals have moved away from Flash to HTML5, meaning most people can go days before encountering a website that still loads some kind of Flash object.
For Chrome, this means Chrome 87, expected to be released in December 2020, which is the industry-agreed cutoff date when Adobe will stop shipping updates and when other browsers also agreed to remove Flash from their stable branches as well. A few years ago it was Apple who refused to allow Flash on a lot of their devices due to the ability of hackers and performance issues that crippled them.
As time progresses Flash will be remember for some real excellent videos or displays but with the latest technology coming in 2018 as well as beyond software will always improve.
You must be logged in to post a comment.