Adobe has announced that it will discontinue Shockwave. Shockwave player for Windows-based PCs will not be available for downloads starting April 9, 2019. The company claims Shockwave usage has been declining as the Web has moved on to HTML5 Canvas and WebGL. Adobe has said that its enterprise customers can continue using Shockwave until 2022. Earlier in 2017, Adobe had phased out Director, an authoring tool for Shockwave.
Web developers have already moved on to HTML5 and WebGL over the last few years. Users wouldn’t miss out on much once Shockwave goes down since most modern Web apps have already stopped using it for quite some time now.
However, there are a bunch of old Web-based games that were built around Shockwave back in the days. Since some of those games haven’t been updated in a while now, they’re likely to become unusable from April this year.
Confirming the move in its FAQ section, Adobe blames the rise of alternative technologies for discontinuing Shockwave. The company says interactive content on the Web has moved on to other modern platforms. Shockwave content was viewed on the Web as well as CD-ROM-based projects that consisted of video games and other interactive content.
Adobe is also killing the Flash Player in 2020, the technology which powered most of the rich media applications on the web long ago. Adobe’s process to kill these ancient technologies has been in a phased manner over the last two years, with the final nail in the coffin due for next year.
After 2020, the company will stop pushing updates for Flash and all major Web browsers will stop supporting it. So far, the company has been actively pushing developers to move their apps to newer, modern platforms.
