If you look at the release notes for the Safari Technology Preview, they explicitly state that the update ends support for Adobe Flash. This marks the end of the line for that Web technology on Macs. At last.
Well almost. If the change is in the Technology Preview it is is likely to hit the public release.
It’s already disabled by default in previous Safari versions, and indeed, as a Mac user, I can confirm that Flash hasn’t been included on my various machines for the last 10 years. I could still download it if I absolutely had to. Now apparently I soon won’t be able to–on Safari at least. I won’t miss it.
Due respect to everything Flash enabled. But it has long since deserved a nice retirement, on a farm somewhere where it can run free (and slow, and generate as much fan noise as it wants to).
Adobe announced in 2017 that it planned to end all support of Flash at the end of 2020, and with that we bid farewell to the term “rich-media” which for those of you who were born more recently means “media.”
It’s been a full ten years since then-CEO Steve Jobs wrote an open letter decrying the technology and the way Adobe chose to support it as justification for the then-controversial change in strategy at Apple. The letter is still live on Apple’s website, and is now a sentimental read and a reminder of how controversy and urgent calls for action can translate into a decade or more even in the world of technology.
Indeed, Flash has been off by default for so long, most users won’t even notice when it’s fully gone; it’s have largely replaced with HTML5 and WebGL, among others.
