LibreOffice 7 will drop support Adobe Flash

The next major version of LibreOffice is 7.0, which is scheduled to be released in August. In its current Release Notes, the developer teams have been shown that LibreOffice will no longer support Adobe Flash SWF.

The current version of LibreOffice still supports Adobe Flash, and users can export presentations and drawings to .SWF format. LibreOffice 7.0 will remove the Macromedia Flash export filter, which means that the export .SWF function is no longer available. The new version comes with improved Docx import and export functions. Currently, LibreOffice adopts compatibility mode to support Docx import and export of Office 2007. In LibreOffice 7.0, the native Office 2013, 2016, and 2019 modes will be used instead.

In 2010, Steven Jobs listed many reasons why his company’s hardware does not support Flash in a letter called Thoughts on Flash, including poor mobile performance and security, which is also one of the factors driving this technology to the end. In 2017, Adobe began to announce that it will stop supporting this technology, and it will eventually be terminated in 2020. Google also said that at the end of 2020, Chrome will officially disable Flash, and starting with Chrome 76, Flash is disabled by default. At the same time, Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla also announced plans to phase out Flash in their respective browsers, and there has been substantial progress.