The South African government launches its own browser just to reactivate Flash support

The South African government launches its own browser just to reactivate Flash support

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Image: ZDNet

The South African Revenue Service this week launched its own custom browser for the sole purpose of reactivating Adobe Flash Player support, rather than transferring its existing site from using Flash to HTML-based web forms.

Flash Player reached its official end of life (EOL) on December 31, 2020, when Adobe officially stopped supporting the software.

To prevent the application from continuing to be used in the real world to the detriment of users and their security, Adobe also began blocking the playback of Flash content within the application as of January 12, with the help of a time bomb.

As Adobe expected, this last step worked as intended and prevented companies from continuing to use the software, forcing many to update their systems and remove the application.

As SARS tweeted on January 12, the agency was impacted by the time bomb mechanism and, from that day on, the agency was unable to receive any tax records through its web portal, where the upload forms were designed as Flash widgets.

But despite having a three-and-a-half-year heads-up, SARS did not choose to port its Flash widgets to basic HTML and JS forms, a process that any web developer would describe as trivial.

Instead, the South African government agency decided to make one of the most mind-boggling decisions in the history of wrong IT decisions and launch its own browser.

Launched Monday on the agency’s official website, the new SARS eFiling Browser is a simplified version of the Chromium browser which has two features.

The first is to re-enable Flash support. The second is to allow users to access the SARS eFiling website.

As Chris Peterson, a software engineer at Mozilla, pointed out, the SARS browser only allows users to access the official SARS website, which slightly reduces the risk of users infecting their systems through Flash exploits while browsing the Web. web.

But, as others have also pointed out, this does not contribute to accessibility, since the browser is only available to Windows users and not to other operating systems such as macOS, Linux and mobile users, who still cannot pay taxes.

Pressed for more answers about his decision to focus on a limited solution through his custom browser, instead of porting some forms on his website, a SARS spokesman did not return a request for comment.

But, despite its unexpected response to Flash EOL, SARS is just an isolated case in the grand scheme of things, as most companies have already changed Adobe Flash operations.

Sure, there are some exceptions here and there that can make headlines due to wrong decisions, but most companies knew well in advance that that day was coming and took steps to avoid any downtime.

Another of those atypical cases that made headlines last week was the case of the local train station in the Chinese city of Dalian. Initial reports it claimed that the train station had to stop all rail traffic after its internal systems, built around Flash, stopped working.

This turned out to be false, and subsequent Chinese media reports clarified that rail traffic never stopped in Dalian because of Flash EOL. However, the reports also admitted that there is some truth to the original report and that, in fact, some internal traffic statistics system stopped working at the railway station on January 12, when Adobe blocked the Flash content from working.

This system was eventually upgraded to a version of Flash Player that Adobe offers only in China, which does not contain the January 12 time bomb mechanism, allowing the system to continue working beyond Flash EOL.

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