Adobe Flash Player officially discontinued after years of problems

The software has declined in popularity since the advent of the internet on mobile phones.

An internet plug-in that was responsible for some of the internet's best-loved viral animations has officially been discontinued.

On 1 January software company Adobe stopped supporting and updating its Flash Player.

The company has asked users to uninstall the software before it blocks all Flash content from 12 January.

First released in 1996, Flash was instrumental in allowing content creators to make and share animations and games that could be downloaded quickly via a dial-up internet connection.

It also helped early versions of websites like YouTube stream high-quality videos.

But it has been plagued with security concerns and struggled to keep up as internet technology developed and users moved to mobile phones to surf the web.

In 2010 Steve Jobs wrote a scathing open letter called Thoughts on Flash, in which he criticised the software and set out why it wouldn't be allowed to run on Apple products.