As a kid, one of my favorite comic book characters was The Flash. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be the fastest man alive?

In the computer world, we have our own Flash – Adobe Flash. Adobe Flash has been around for a long time. It’s software that works within a browser to present videos, animations and lots of games. It’s been a good program over the years except that it has had almost insurmountable security flaws which hackers quickly used to infect computers. The bad guys would inject everything from pop-ups to malware to data collectors in Flash and, often, the computer user was none the wiser.

There’s now a different, safer software technology which will do what Adobe Flash did and that is HTML5. (You don’t have to install HTML5 like we installed Flash; websites are built with it and then your browser handles the rest.) Because this is so much safer than Flash, Adobe has announced that it will stop supporting Flash in 2020.

Already, browsers have stopped Flash from running automatically. You now have to give permission for each website on which you want Flash to run. Also, with the latest version of Windows 10 – 1809 – in Microsoft Edge, you have to give Flash permission to run each time you are on a particular website. (You used to be able to choose “Always Allow.”)

For those who play games powered by Flash, you should see the handwriting on the wall. Those gaming sites still using Flash are either going to have to change to something else or they are going to leave computer users at risk.

For those of us who don’t play games online, we’ll hardly notice that Flash is gone. In fact, just like my old comic book hero, Flash will just be a blur.