Yesterday the usual tech news outlets were buzzing over an accidental tweet which the media incorrectly interpreted as Mozilla was ditching flash (Blame The Verge for the chain reaction of copied news articles) entirely as a policy. While that is not the case, I was just as excited as many at the faux-news. This got me thinking: what would it really take for the web to kill Adobe Flash? Could Mozilla really make such a move and kill Flash on its own if it wanted to?

My thought is that Mozilla could not because users would be upset at the immediate lack of support for flash which is widely used. However, if Mozilla talked to other browsers including the Chrome Team, Opera, Vivaldi, Safari etc and made a coordinated effort to get at least some of the major names to agree on a set date to end their support for flash, say a year or so out, then I think it would be possible for Adobe Flash to die.

But absent the above happening a tweet by Alex Stamos, CSO of Facebook is right and maybe he understated it because it is really past time for Adobe to do the right thing and announce a end-of-life date for Adobe Flash in the next year or two. Such an announcement would give websites a year or two to do the major task of removing flash from millions of sites around the world.

The open web would be a better place without Flash but it would also be a better place without Java (sorry Minecraft fans but that game needs porting to HTML5) and other relics of the early less open web.
If you agree it is time for a open web free of flash then go give Alex Stamos’s tweet a RT and buy him a beer.

 

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BenjaminKerensaDotComMozilla/~3/Ara6LC9FU5s/can-we-kill-adobe-flash