Adobe has been telling vendors for months to stop developing programs and websites with flash and to switch to using HTML5 instead. Adobe has given a deadline for when flash will no longer be developed and supported and that deadline is now the end of 2020. Internet Browser developers such as Microsoft, Apple, Chrome, and Firefox have decided to phase out flash in steps and make it harder and harder for the end user to enable and use flash on websites. We are starting to see those steps as users are having trouble using websites with flash content. The two browsers with the best support in our environment are Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. The technology department recommends that you use Google Chrome when dealing with any page that requires Flash to work. There are three reasons for this and they are as follows.
- Microsoft Edge Browser is NOT available for our Windows 8.1 student machines. As all of our Windows 8.1 machines are replaced with Windows 10 machines this will become less of an issue.
- With Chrome we can enable certain settings for you and white-list websites to make them easier to use. Edge is still in its infancy and does not yet support these features.
- Chrome is available to install on all of our machines from the Software Center and is auto updated by Google to always have the latest flash support.
Late last year Chrome started needing to ask your permission to run Flash when you use a Flash enabled website. Chrome will continue phasing out Flash over the next few years, first by asking for your permission to run Flash in more situations, and eventually disabling it by default. Google will remove Flash completely from Chrome toward the end of 2020.
If you have a website that is “required” by curriculum that uses flash, you can email that URL address to the technology department and we can “try” to make that website easier to use until the time that Flash is no longer available.
