Windows 10 update will wipe out Flash once and for all

Adobe Flash, the multimedia software platform that has powered so many pre-YouTube animated videos like Homestar Runner, is officially an old technology. As of December 31, 2020, Adobe has stopped supporting the software, and now Microsoft is telling every Windows 10 user that it’s time to give it up if they haven’t already.

A new Windows 10 update from Microsoft, currently available through its Update the catalog, permanently removes Flash from the operating system according to Most recent windows, but only for Windows 10 versions 1903 and earlier and multiple versions of Windows Server. The same fix will be rolled out to Windows Update over the next month or so and will be available through Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) in early 2021. (The update is also expected to be available for version 1909, but it’s not clear why the fix for this version doesn’t appear on the Update Catalog page.) At first, the update will be optional, but it will then be moved to the recommended updates a few months later.

Applying the update will only remove the Adobe Flash Player that was installed by your version of Windows – not if you manually installed it from another source, says Microsoft. After the update is applied, Adobe Flash will be removed from Control Panel and Windows 10 users will not be able to cancel the update. Users can also uninstall Flash via Adobe website.

If you absolutely have to reinstall Flash again, you will need to reset your device to an older version system restore point. If you don’t have a restore point, be sure to create one before applying the Flash Removal Update.

By the end of the month, Microsoft will also have removed Adobe Flash Player from its new Edge browser. “From January 2021, Adobe Flash Player will be disabled by default and all versions older than KB4561600 published in June 2020 will be blocked. Adobe Flash Player-related downloadable resources hosted on Microsoft’s websites will no longer be available, ” says Microsoft.

Microsoft Edge Legacy and Internet Explorer 11 users should also have received their latest Adobe Flash security update in December 2020 or earlier. Google chrome has already dropped Flash, with Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari. Safari stopped supporting Flash in September 2020 with version 14. If you try to download the Flash plug-in from the Adobe website, your browser will now prevent you from doing so.

Additionally, Adobe will block Flash content will no longer run in Flash Player as of January 12, 2021 to “help secure users’ systems”, it says. Since macOS and Windows will no longer be receive Flash security updates, it makes sense to do so since it is now an obsolete technology.

First developed by FutureWave before being acquired by Macromedia and then Adobe, Flash was the perfect way to integrate sophisticated animations, video players, and video games into websites in the late 90s and early 2000s. This paved the way for fully immersive and interactive websites that are the norm today. But the proliferation of bigger and better platforms like HTML5, OpenFL, and Unity has slowly started to make Flash obsolete. Adobe renamed its Flash authoring environment to Adobe animate in 2015 to extend support for HTML5 and encourage developers to build with new web standards instead of Flash.

The majority What you encounter on a website today is not Flash but HTML5 or some other open standard that takes much less time to display web pages. Not only do modern authoring environments consume significantly less CPU resources, something like HTML5 doesn’t need a browser plug-in to work, unlike Flash. HTML5 works natively with all browsers and is SEO friendly too.

Adobe will continue to support Animate – and in case you were wondering, Homestar Runner East still alive and beating. Also Internet Archive has already preserved over 1000 flash items including classics like Badger, All your bases belong to us, and It’s peanut butter and jam time. I have not seen Salad fingers on the list, but there are already a bunch of episodes on David Finch’s YouTube Channel.