A Flash in the pan … if only it had been.

Adobe Flash, how do I hate thee, let me count the ways …

Adobe has announced that in 2020 they will be killing Flash. Well, what the company said is that there will be no more updates, which, given its security record, will make continuing to use it a bit like playing Russian roulette with six bullets.

Adobe, arm in arm with partners Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Mozilla, said support for Flash will ramp down across the internet in phases over the next three years. Given the downward trajectory of support already witnessed – like not supporting it on anyone's mobile devices – presumably this "ramping" will get more cliff-like as the target approaches.

The companies are begging, sorry, "encouraging" developers to migrate their software onto modern technologies and platforms.

Flash, a once-near-ubiquitous technology used to power most of the media content on the web, appears to this writer to now mainly be found on the websites of bands, restaurants and, for some reason, a surprising number of organisational Security Awareness training packages.

Because, of course, you would never want to check information about bands or restaurants on a mobile device –  which don't support Flash – while you were out or something.

Created more than 20 years ago, Flash was once the preferred software used by developers to create games, media players, rich media websites and applications capable of running on multiple web browsers.

It does need to be noted that some of the games were good, and some of the websites beautiful.

 "Few technologies have had such a profound and positive impact in the internet era," said Govind Balakrishnan, vice president of product development for Adobe Creative Cloud.

Well maybe, certainly few technologies have caused such surge in power bills due to 100 per cent CPU usage. It's a wonder senior management types for electricity vendors aren't hurling themselves from the 30th floor.

Adobe has at times hotly disputed the issues with performance – often having to yell to get over the fan noise – despite the rather compelling evidence of spikes and flatlines on Activity Monitors and Task Managers the world over.

When Adobe acquired Flash in its 2005 purchase of Macromedia, the claim was made that the technology was on more than 98 per cent of personal computers connected to the web.

Flash's popularity may have already begun to wane before Apple's decision not to support it on the iPhone, but that decision both accelerated the process and highlighted the shortcomings.

In 2010, Apple CEO Steve Jobs criticised Flash's reliability, security and performance.

Since then, technologies such as HTML5 have emerged as alternatives to Flash, allowing comparable media manipulation and presentation, while displaying less of a tendency to hose the CPU and less of tendency to act as a kind of overly familiar concierge for malware.

In fact, it is hard to give a real idea of the extent of Flash security vulnerabilities without a lot more paper and some good pagination.

Possibly because of this, Adobe is bullish about its prospects beyond Flash's long goodbye.

"In fact, we think the opportunity for Adobe is greater in a post-Flash world," Balakrishnan said.

To me, that statement has the ring of truth – and not just for Adobe.