Adobe Flash Was Never Dead

This morning several tech journalism outlets were reporting— with some truly awful puns— that Firefox, the web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation, was now blocking Adobe Flash. In light of revelations that major security flaws in Flash were exploited by the Hacking Team, Mozilla decided to be proactive and make enabling Flash an opt-in procedure rather than a default. Flash is a software suite used for doing everything from playing audio and video on web pages, to providing interactive graphics and simple games right in a computer's browser.

When the second-most used web browser on the internet decides it can't play nice with your technology until you get your act together, it's a big deal. Even so, reports of Flash's demise were greatly exaggerated, not to mention premature. The browser blocked Flash, yes, but users still had the ability to opt in and continue using it. Other than that minor inconvenience, the block wasn't preventing users from doing anything.

Hours later, Adobe released an update, version 18.0.0.209, that they claim fixes those security issues that were brought to their attention. This version is no longer being automatically blocked by Firefox, though Mozilla's not holding its breath about another security breach. Adobe's own blog post about the update doesn't exactly inspire confidence , and it's their own technology.

Why all the pessimism about Flash? Why is the Chief of Security of Facebook calling for Flash's discontinuation? Mostly because a far superior alternative, HTML5, has been around for a while now. The triple-threat of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript (which provides its own problems) can do just about everything Flash can do, and work on mobile devices even better. With that said, Flash is still used on about 10.6 percent of web pages on the internet.

So like a majestic phoenix that won't let you play embedded videos on your iPhone, Flash rises from the ashes once again. Flash's death won't come anytime soon since of plenty developers are unable or unwilling to update their platforms to use HTML5. As long as Adobe keeps patching holes, they won't have to.