Flash EOL

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

Adobe

Adobe announced that it would cease to support Flash Player at the end of 2020. Users have been prompted to uninstall Flash Player, and recent versions of the plugin refuse to run all Flash content since January 12, 2021.

Adobe also ceased to support AIR at the end of 2020 and transferred development responsibility for Adobe AIR to HARMAN, a subsidiary of Samsung. HARMAN now provides extended support for Adobe Flash to enterprise customers.

Mozilla

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

  • In September 2019, Firefox 69 removed the "always activate" option for Flash, making regular usage of the Flash plugin cumbersome.
  • Firefox 85, released on January 26, 2021, completely removed support for Adobe Flash.
  • Firefox ESR 78.15, released on October 5, 2021, was the last version of Firefox to support Flash Player.

Google

The Chromium project has published a Flash roadmap as well.

  • An infobar announced that Chrome would no longer support Flash.
  • In July 2019, Chrome 76 disabled Flash by default, which the user needs to re-enable through the browser settings. The user is required to add an exception for each site in order to run Flash, and these site settings are cleared every time the browser exits. In short, running Flash is very difficult.
  • Chrome 88, released on January 19, 2021, removed support for Adobe Flash.

Microsoft

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

  • The new Microsoft Edge (Edge Chromium) followed the same timeline as Google Chrome for removal of Flash.
  • Microsoft planned to remove Flash support from Microsoft Edge Legacy (EdgeHTML) at the end of 2020, but it is unknown whether this actually happened. Microsoft Edge Legacy was removed from most computers with the April 2021 Windows updates, so it may be difficult to check.
  • Internet Explorer maintains support for Flash and other ActiveX controls. It is necessary to manually install Flash Player; see below for details.
  • Microsoft announced that the Internet Explorer application will no longer be supported after June 15, 2022. It will still be possible to run Flash Player and other ActiveX controls using Microsoft Edge's Internet Explorer mode.

As explained on the Microsoft Edge blog an update was released for Windows 10 and 8.1 that permanently removes Flash as a component of the Windows operating system. It has already been installed automatically on many systems, and will be pushed to many more systems in the July 2021 Cumulative Update. It will also be installed as part of the upgrade to Windows 10 version 21H1. 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 means that if the Flash Player ActiveX control is installed through other means, Internet Explorer will load it. However, the post also states that "all versions [of Flash Player] older than KB4561600 released in June 2020 will be blocked." The June 2020 Flash Player update introduced the full "kill switch," which prevents Flash content from running after January 12, 2021.

Luckily, there is a solution to run Flash in Internet Explorer: install the latest available ActiveX Flash Player version, then use FlashPatch to patch out the kill switch. Here are the instructions for doing so.

Apple

Safari versions 14 and later no longer support Flash Player.

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