For years now, Adobe Flash has been giving security teams chills and frights, like every Patch Tuesday was another Halloween night.
And while Adobe will stop updating Flash in late 2020, Google is not waiting for that time to essentially ditch Flash from search results.
"Goodbye, Flash."
Those two words are the title of a post on the Google Webmaster Blog, where Google's Engineering Manager Dong-Hwi Lee wrote about this.
"Google Search will stop supporting Flash later this year. In Web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content. Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files.
Flash, you inspired the web. Now, there are web standards like HTML5 to continue your legacy."
We checked the Flash vulnerability list at CVE Details, and it shows 1,078 known security holes for the product dating back to 2005.
Buffer overflow, remote code execution, and denial of service vulnerabilities kicked things off back in the day.
The list contains hundreds of documented vulnerabilities and security alerts for Adobe Flash that total 22 pages in a tiny font. See the Adobe Flash vulnerability list here.
While saying goodbye to indexing Flash files, Google's Engineering Manager also paid homage to how Adobe Flash changed things and how popular it was.
"Flash was the answer to the boring static web, with rich animations, media, and actions. It was a prolific technology that inspired many new content creators on the web. It was everywhere. The Flash runtime, which plays Flash content, was installed 500 million times in the second half of 2013.
I still remember my son playing endless number of Flash games until my wife yelled at him. It's time to go to bed, son."
He concludes:
"Hey Flash, it's your turn to go to bed."
And as far as Google is concerned, that's about to happen.