The end of an era will arrive on December 31, when Adobe will cease to provide updates for Flash Player, an iconic app which contributed to the rise of the modern internet as we know it.
Microsoft has released a new Windows 10 update that is able to remove Adobe Flash Players from computers before Adobe pulls the plug at the end of the year. The update is able to remove Flash from machines that run Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 from version 1607 to 1909.
Death of an icon
Introduced by Adobe more than two decades ago, Flash was used for the creation of a large number of media content, including animations, mobile apps and games, rich web animations and embedded video players. During its prime days, Flash was the primary platform for the development of multimedia content.
Adobe has started to encourage developers to move to HTML 5 at the start of the last decade, as Flash was becoming expensive to support and it required several plugins for proper implementation. Apple was one of the first companies that pulled Flash from its mobile devices, arguing that it works poorly and requires an excessive amount of power.
Culling update
The update released by Microsoft can also be downloaded manually from the Microsoft Update Catalog, but users should keep in mind the fact that it cannot be uninstalled afterward.
Some users may need access to Adobe Flash Player after the update has been installed, and there are two solutions for the potential problem. The first one involves the use of a system restore point that can be created before the update is installed. The other one involves a fresh installation of Windows. Since the update isn’t installed automatically, there is no need to worry, but it worth noting that Flash will become a major security vulnerability at the start of 2021.
