Facebook wants Adobe to announce Flash's expiry date

Facebook's chief security officer Alex Stamos, who joined the social networking company just over a couple of weeks ago, has called for an end to Adobe Flash support. Over the past weekend, he sent out a couple of tweets sharing his thoughts on the matter.

It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day.

— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2015

Even if 18 months from now, one set date is the only way to disentangle the dependencies and upgrade the whole ecosystem at once.

— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2015

Incidentally, his comments came just a week after hackers compromised Italy-based spy software company Hacking Team's systems and stole a 400GB cache of files, revealing a major Flash vulnerability.

The company's internal documents describe the vulnerability as "the most beautiful Flash bug for the last four years." A couple of more Flash vulnerabilities have also been found since then.

Many technologists in the past have criticized Flash for being a buggy software. For those who aren't aware, back in 2010, Steve Jobs even wrote an open letter detailing why Apple would not allow Adobe's software on its devices. In the letter he said, "Flash is the number one reason Macs crash."

Via