Adobe Shockwave Player will be discontinued on April 9th
Adobe has announced that it will discontinue its Shockwave web content player on April 9th, 2019. From that date forward, the software will be unavailable for download.
In a Frequently Asked Questions page about the discontinuation of Shockwave, Adobe cited that the rapidly declining usage of Adobe Shockwave Player in the face of more modern platforms like
HTML 5 and
WebGL is the primary reason for retiring it.
The discontinuation of Shockwave on Windows is the last part of a three-pronged shutdown for the entirety of Shockwave. This final step follows in the footsteps of the February 1st, 2017 discontinuation of Adobe Director and the March 1st, 2017 discontinuation of the
macOS version of Shockwave.
Adobe recommends moving to Adobe Animate,
Adobe XD, and
Adobe Dreamweaver for producing web content that can be utilized by modern platforms. AlternativeTo.net has plenty of other software alternatives as well, such as
Sketch and
OpenToonz for interactive and artistic content creation, as well as the likes of
Brackets for web design and editing.
Further coverage:
Adobe Shockwave End of Life FAQ
Engadget
gHacks Tech News
The Verge