Flash EOL

This page describes the roadmap for the end of support for Flash Player.

Adobe

Adobe announced that it will cease to support Flash Player at the end of 2020. According to the Flash Player End of Life page, users will be prompted to uninstall Flash Player, and Flash Player plugin will block all Flash content from running after 2020.

Adobe also announced that it will transfer development responsibility for Adobe AIR to HARMAN, a subsidiary of Samsung. HARMAN will also provide extended support for Adobe Flash to enterprise customers. Adobe will cease to support AIR at the end of 2020.

Mozilla

Mozilla has published a roadmap for the gradual removal of Flash from Firefox.

• In September 2019, Firefox 69 will remove the "always activate" option for Flash, making regular usage of the Flash plugin cumbersome.
• Starting in early 2020, only Firefox ESR will support Flash.
• Once Adobe ceases to support Flash, Firefox will refuse to load it. The roadmap does not clarify whether old versions of Firefox will be able to load the plugin, or whether it will be added to Mozilla's plugin blocklist.
• Firefox 85 will completely remove support for Adobe Flash.

Google

The Chromium project has published a Flash roadmap as well.

• An infobar announces that Chrome will no longer support Flash.
• In July 2019, Chrome 76 will disable Flash, which the user will need to re-enable through the browser settings. Then, the user will be required to add an exception for each site in order to run Flash, and these site settings will be cleared every time the browser exits. In short, running Flash will become very difficult.
• In December 2020, Chrome 87 will remove Flash support.

Microsoft

The Microsoft Edge team published an update to their timeline for removing Flash support.

• The next Edge (Edge Chromium) will follow the same timeline as Google Chrome for removal of Flash.
• Internet Explorer and the current version of Microsoft Edge (EdgeHTML) will continue to support Flash up to the end of 2020. The current Flash experience will continue through that time.
• At the end of 2020, Microsoft will remove the ability to run Flash in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge in supported versions of Windows (meaning Windows 8 and 10).

According to a recent update on the Microsoft Edge blog, a Windows update will permanently remove Flash as a component of the Windows operating system. The update will be optional at the beginning of 2021, but a few months later it will be "made recommended", which likely means that it will be installed automatically. Microsoft says that "this update will be permanent and cannot be un-installed."

The post also says that "once you make the switch from Microsoft provided Adobe Flash Player, it will be treated as any other third-party plug-in and will not receive Customer Support from Microsoft." This implies that if the Flash Player ActiveX control is installed through other means, Internet Explorer will load it. However, "all versions [of Flash Player] older than KB4561600 released in June 2020 will be blocked." Unfortunately, June 2020 seems to be the first Flash Player update containing the full "kill switch" which would prevent Flash content from running after 2020. So it is unclear if there will be any way for typical users to run Flash content in Internet Explorer or Edge after 2020.