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 will completely remove support for Adobe Flash. According to the Mozilla Blog, it will be released on January 26, 2021.
  • There is no official word on when Firefox ESR will remove Flash support. According to the release calendar, the last Firefox 78.x ESR release is on 2021-09-07; it is possible that Firefox ESR will support running Flash through that date.

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 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.
  • In January 19, 2021, Chrome 88 removed Flash support.

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.
  • Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge Legacy (EdgeHTML) ceased to support Flash at the end of 2020.

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 prevented Flash content from running after 2020. So it is unclear if there is any way for typical users to run Flash content in Internet Explorer or Edge after 2020.

Apple

Safari version 14 no longer supports Flash Player.

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