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Windows 10 Update Will Eliminate Adobe Flash for Good

By Laura Tucker
News Windows 10 Flash Featured

This one has been a pretty long death knell. Adobe Flash has been dragged along far longer than it should have been. Windows 10 will finally end its tenure with Adobe Flash when the latest update is installed. It will purge it from your system, and there won’t be any way to get it back unless you downgrade.

Adobe Flash on Life Support

Honestly, the writing has been on the wall for this one for quite some time. Adobe Flash was a software that at one time was the top software for viewing multimedia. It was often run as a plug-in from your browser.

Flash started as a product of FutureWave and was picked up by Macromedia in 1996, then ended up as an Adobe product in 2005.

News Windows 10 Flash Logo

In 2017, Adobe announced Flash was nearing the end of its life and gave it last rights. The company announced they were pulling the plug for good on December 31, 2020, just two short months from now.

Microsoft Update to Remove Adobe Flash

Adobe Flash has definitely had its day, but many feel that day is done and consider Flash to be outdated, buggy, and insecure.

If you’ve had a difficult time saying goodbye, Microsoft is going to help you out. Once you install the latest Windows 10 update, it will purge Flash Player from your system.

There will be a certain finality to the loss of Adobe Flash. You will not be able to get it back once you install the update. The only way you will be able to get it back is to restore your system to its state before the update or reinstall the Windows OS in its entirety.

News Windows 19 Flash Updating

Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Mozilla announced plans long ago to end support of Flash by December 2020. Apple’s iOS never did incorporate it, which was difficult in the beginning until other operating systems picked up the same idea.

The Chrome browser already started disabling it, as did Firefox. The Edge browser is still supporting it, but that will be done in December. It will only allow it to load as a plug-in on Edge when the browser is run in Internet Explorer mode.

Whether you’ll be cheering the demise of Adobe Flash or bidding it a fond farewell, remember that the latest Windows 10 update will eliminate it permanently.

Learn more about the decision to end Flash support and how to access it if your browser has already discontinued its use.

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Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

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