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Flash is dead—but South Africa didn’t get the memo

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Why convert Flash upload forms to Javascript, when you could just contract a couple of Russian dudes to build a custom browser with deprecated, unsafe plugins?

Enlarge / Why convert Flash upload forms to Javascript, when you could just contract a couple of Russian dudes to build a custom browser with deprecated, unsafe plugins? (credit: Aurich Lawson)

The South African Revenue Service ran into a big problem this month: Adobe Flash stopped working on January 12, 2021, and the agency (still) hadn’t migrated all of its e-filing forms from Flash to HTML and JavaScript. So to “fix” the issue, SARS decided to release its own, custom browser with a working Flash plugin preinstalled and enabled.

Adobe announced a timeline for the final death of Flash more than three years ago, with the elderly plugin slated to leave support in December 2020 and be actively blocked from functioning as of January 12, 2021. As of today, the majority of SARS’ online filing system has been migrated to HTML5—but there are still a few languishing holdouts with no HTML5 version in sight. SARS’ new “browser” is a stopgap which allows South African taxpayers and traders access to the remaining forms in the meantime.

Behold:

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