Adobe Finally Killing Off Shockwave in April

End-of-Life Approaching

Adobe is putting the final nail in the coffin of Adobe Shockwave plugin, announcing its discontinuation starting April 9th, 2019.

One can’t really say they did not see this coming. In fact, it is surprising that it has held on for so long and it remains one of the last vestiges of the old web.

Adobe already discontinued the Director app used to create Shockwave content back in February 2017. This was followed by a discontinuation of the Shockwave player for MacOS in March 2017.

What About Shockwave License Holders?

Windows users will finally see it end on the platform on April 9, although some customers will be able to still use it until their contracts expire. For enterprise users, the death is even more prolonged up to the year 2022.

Aside from Shockwave, Adobe also intends to terminate Flash by 2020. With it is the death of proprietary plugins for online multimedia as well.

With open technologies such as HTML5 and WebGL, it really does not make sense for the company to keep supporting Shockwave and Flash. HTML5 is also much more secure and is platform agnostic, requiring no further software or plugin installation to run.