Flash has been a part of the internet since the early 2000s and has helped create the content rich sites that populate the web today. However, back in 2017 Adobe announced their plans to stop supporting Flash by the end of 2020. Given Adobe’s decision, Brave will also drop support for Flash content moving forward.

Why is Flash being depreciated?

Dropping support for Flash comes down to two main factors: new open standard web technologies and security.

• New Technologies
  Over the past decade, new open standards -- ie HTML5, WebGL, Web Assembly -- have been refined and enhanced such that they now reliably replace the capabilities that Flash once provided. These new standards are now more commonly integrated directly into web browsers and are slowly phasing out the plugins.
• Security
  Flash runs inside the same memory and process as the browser. Due to frequent bugs found in the software, it is easy for bad actors to exploit them and gain access to specific memory addresses, potentially gaining control of your machine.

How will this affect me while browsing?

Brave will allow users to run Flash on websites on a per-session basis until it’s fully deprecated, at which point it will be disabled by default. In the interim, if you visit a site that requires Flash, you will be prompted to allow Flash to run for this session unless the site migrates to open web standards, in which case the site will appear normally.