End Of Life For Adobe Flash Player
Since Adobe no longer supports Flash Player after December 31, 2020 and blocked Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021, Adobe strongly recommends all users immediately uninstall Flash Player to help protect their systems.
Flash Player will reach its end of life (EOL) at the end of December 2020, after always being a security risk to those who have used it over the years.
The demise of Adobe’s multimedia software platform was first revealed in a coordinated announcement from Apple, Adobe, Facebook, Google, and Mozilla in July 2017.
Flash Player’s end of life is good news given that it will drastically reduce the attack surface threat actors can use to hack into web browsers and operating systems.
To make sure that all users know of its imminent deprecation, Adobe has also started displaying alerts on Windows computers recommending users to “immediately” uninstall Flash Player from their systems.
Adobe has published uninstall instructions for both Windows and Mac users. Here’s how it works:
- Download an uninstaller application for Flash Player. (There is a different one for each operating system; and if you’re on Mac, pay attention to which OS version you’re using.)
- Run the uninstaller. (On Windows, you’ll first need to close out all browsers and programs that use Flash. On iOS, you’ll do that as part of the process.)
- Then, you can verify that the uninstallation was successful by restarting your computer and then checking the status of Flash Player on your computer from the Adobe website.
Flash Player was created by Macromedia and has been developed and distributed by Adobe Systems since Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. Flash Player is distributed as freeware. Flash Player was discontinued on 31 December 2020, and its download page disappeared two days later.
R.I.P. – Flash Player – 1996 / 2020