notabul

What should I use instead?

Some businesses run on code more than ten years old.

They don’t care if you sympathize. The business or institution decides how it wants to prioritize replacement, and some projects miss deadlines.

If you think that every application running in an enterprise has stopped using Flash, you’re sorely mistaken.

The article is about deprecating and taking functionality out of use.

My point is that deprecation is by its very nature going to hurt something that isn’t prepared for its demise.

There is no good way to do it. There are only less bad ways to do it.

The idea of deprecation and death of code assumes that those using it can easily stop.

That’s not always the case.

When Flash dies Jan 12, 2021, you’ll see what I mean.

There’s been so much misinformation about it, but there’s an OS datetime check in the Flash viewer code, browsers will disable the plugin even for some older versions not just new releases and have or will remove PPAPI and NPAPI support, and Windows already has an optional update to kill Flash support that will be part of regular updates in Summer 2021.

Even with three years of warning, it’s not ok.

It’s an extreme case of deprecation, being attempted by the best in the business, but it is inherently bad, and there’s hardly a good way of doing it.