Facebook's new CSO Alex Stamos calls for Adobe Flash to be discontinued

Adobe Flash: Kill it with axes, burn the remains, load the ashes into a rocket, and blast it into the sun, says Facebook's new CSO (well, sort of)

Facebook's freshly installed new chief security officer (CSO) Alex Stamos has called for Adobe Flash to be retired, following the latest claims that zero-day security flaws in the Flash Player software were exploited by Hacking Team, the security company that provided hacking tools to governments around the world.

Stamos, who has just moved to Facebook from Yahoo, Tweeted: "It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day."

He followed that up by arguing that organisations are sticking with Flash because it is easier than re-writing to support the open-standards alternative, HTML5, instead. "Nobody takes the time to rewrite their tools and upgrade to HTML5 because they expect Flash4Eva. Need a date to drive it," he said.

However, such a move would affect a slew of popular games played on Facebook using the Flash Player application - although it might encourage a shift towards HTML5, which was designed to support the kind of animation and interactivity that Flash brings to web pages.

Facebook now supports a combination of Flash and HTML5 - its own video player now uses HTML5 instead of Flash - and is presumably looking forward to Flash being phased out entirely.

Flash has also proved exceptionally hard to kill off, despite its unpopularity in many quarters for more than a decade.

Apple's iconic CEO Steve Jobs had gone out of his way to keep Adobe Flash off of Apple's mobile platforms when he launched the iPhone - an attitude that many at the time would inhibit adoption and use of the iPhone.

"Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript - all open standards," wrote Jobs in a near-1,700 word justification.

Although Adobe goes further than more companies in porting its software to various platforms - supporting Mac OS and Linux on the desktop, as well as Microsoft Windows - Jobs believed that Flash belonged to the 1990s era of the Windows PC. Jobs claimed that Flash was "designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers".

"We don't want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods, and iPads by adding Flash," Jobs bluntly summarised.

In truth, though, Jobs' attitude was also no doubt coloured by the competitive threat that Flash posed as a cross-platform development tool to the tools that Apple was building to support its own proprietary platform