Less than five per cent of the Internet uses Adobe Flash now

Less than five percent of today's websites use Abobe Flash code.

That's according to the latest data from web tech survey site W3Techs, who says this number represents a big drop, down from 28.5 per cent seven years ago at the start of 2011.

While a less-than-13 per cent decline doesn't sound like much over the space of seven years, you should consider that the number refers to all the websites currently on the internet, not just a selection of the more popular ones.

Just think about all the old abandoned sites still operating online using Adobe's tech, simply because they haven't been updated or deleted yet. When you take this into consideration, it really does show how little websites that are frequented still use Flash.

The decline is likely the reason why Adobe has decided to retire the software at the end of 2020.

The findings by W3Techs have also been echoed by Google recently. The firm uncovered similar statistics back in February, published by a Google security engineer.

Speaking at a security conference in San Diego, Director of Engineering at Google, Parisa Tabriz, said the proportion of Chrome users who've loaded at least one page containing Flash content per day had dwindled from approximately 80 per cent in 2014 to less than 8 per cent four years later in 2018.

According to Bleeping Computer, the engineer attributed the downfall to the rise of web-based technologies like HTML5 and CSS3, but also on configuration changes made by Chrome and other browsers, which disabled Flash rendering and moved to an "HTML5-by-default" experience.

In the same month Tabriz announced his findings, Adobe patched a zero-day vulnerability in its Flash player that North Korean hacking groups have reportedly been exploiting since November.

After the flaw was uncovered, the South Korean Computer Emergency Response Team (KR-CERT) warned citizens of the bug. Codenamed CVE-2018-4878, it was thought to allow hackers to take advantage of Office documents with embedded malicious Flash content distributed via email.

The South Korean authorities believed that hackers associated with the authoritarian government in Pyongyang were using the zero-day vulnerability to launch attacks on South Korean researchers working on projects about North Korea.