Adobe announced it would end support for the multimedia plug-in Flash by the end of 2020.

"Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats," the company wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

Flash, historically one of the most successful tools to ease the creation of interactive content, was also one of the most common vectors for hackers to break into computers.

According to a 2016 year-end report by Recorded Future, more than half of the ten most used security flaws in commercially available exploit kits — a building block for making malware — were in Flash.

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At the same time, Flash was crucial in developing what people expected from the internet. Its ease handling video was critical for video sharing sites like YouTube, and it was the foundation for many early sites to mix multimedia with interactive content.

The use of Flash has waned in recent years as sites have begun to adopt multimedia programming standards not tied to a specific manufacturer. Many of the functionalities of Flash are now built into fundamental programming languages of the internet.

"Over the years, Flash has helped bring the Web to greatness with innovations in media and animation, which ultimately have been added to the core web platform," wrote Mozilla, makers of the FireFox web browser, in a post responding to Adobe's decision.