While many onlookers have been pretty sure the death of Adobe’s Flash Player is all but inevitable, a new report suggests that day could come a little sooner than expected.Flash, once ubiquitous in browsers, is on “life support” and will all but disappear in the next two years, predicts a new report from encoding.com. The prediction follows the report’s findings that use of Flash decreased by 15% in 2015, compared with the previous year.

While it hasn’t disappeared entirely, the report notes that the technology is now primarily used in banner ads and older browsers.

“While Flash is still being used for specific uses and edge cases such as banner ads and legacy browsers, it’s days are numbered,” the Global Media Format Report for 2016 says. “Flash outputs decreased nearly 15% in 2015. We expect to see the Flash video codec disappear completely from our report with 24 months.”

Flash became a central part of how we browse the Internet in the early 2000’s as it was used to display games and other interactive elements of web pages, as well as to play videos and music. But current technology has made Flash increasingly irrelevant, and use of the now much-maligned browser plugin has been plunging in recent years, particularly after several high profile security vulnerabilities were linked to the software.

It seems that even Adobe may be ready to give up on Flash — at least in name. The company announced in December that it was rebranding Flash Professional to Adobe Animate CC, in order to “more accurately represent its position as the premier animation tool for the web and beyond.”
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