Twitter Reacts To Adobe Discontinuing Flash Player In 2020

In a post Tuesday, Adobe confirmed that it will discontinue Flash Player by 2020. The long-time web standard has powered everything from videos to games and Adobe detailed why it plans on ending support for Flash:

But as open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the web. Over time, we’ve seen helper apps evolve to become plugins, and more recently, have seen many of these plugin capabilities get incorporated into open web standards. Today, most browser vendors are integrating capabilities once provided by plugins directly into browsers and deprecating plugins.

Read: Google Publicly Discloses Security Flaw In Adobe Flash

On Twitter, users had a range of reactions to the news. Many took the opportunity to wax nostalgic about the sites that were powered by Flash. Especially in the late '90s and early '00s, free game sites and video sites were often powered by Flash.

MacWorld columnist Jason Snell called back to former Apple CEO Steve Jobs' famous column in 2010 blasting Flash and explaining why iOS wouldn't support the web standard.

Read: Microsoft Plans To Kill 'Unnecessary' Adobe Flash Content

For others, the opportunity to move past Flash and its technical limitations looks to be a clear upside. Among many web analysts, Flash has been a punching bag for years because of concerns over its security abilities.

But for many, the chance to avoid Flash Player's regular calls for updates might be the biggest takeaway from Adobe's news.