Adobe will discontinue (end of life) their SVG plugin starting January 1, 2008. This is not so surprising given their new-found interest in Flash after acquiring Macromedia; what is surprising is that they plan to actually remove the plugin from the Adobe download area after 2009 (and no, third parties are not allowed to redistribute it under the current licence).

While Opera and Firefox have native SVG support, Internet Explorer, which still has the dominant market share, has no good alternatives (Mark Finkle’s VML-based SVG emulation is only a start). This is sure to spark outrage among application developers (though, to be honest, everyone knows that other than Flash or DHTML, there is no safe way).

Update: Adobe has yielded to pressure and agreed to continue distributing the plugin indefinitely (though there will be no further releases, in particular no Vista version).