According to manufacturers’ elaborate plan, since beginning of 2021 support for Adobe Flash Player was finally discontinued. This means that Adobe has officially stopped distributing Flash Player and its updates, and browser developers have stopped supporting Flash plugins.
In addition, an emergency “switch” was introduced into the Flash Player code in advance, which prevents the launch of any Flash content, starting from January 12, 2021.
Last year, in preparation for the final end of support for Flash Player, Microsoft created update KB4577586 to remove Adobe Flash from all versions of Windows 8, 10 and Windows Server and prevent it from being reinstalled.
At that time, the update was only available through the official catalog and could not be removed after installation. However, the update was optional, although it was forcibly rolled out in February to some Windows 10 machines.
In general, the company promised that in early 2021 this update will be distributed via WSUS and Windows Update and will be made mandatory. On Microsoft’s blog can be found a post that reveals further plans regarding KB4577586.
Starting June 2021, Microsoft plans to include KB4577586 as part of optional Windows 10 cumulative preview updates for Windows 10 1809 and later.
It also became known that in Windows 21H1, the preview version of which will become public this month, the KB4577586 update will be installed automatically, that is, the Adobe Flash Player plugin will be automatically removed.
It is unlikely that the final removal of Flash Player will be noticed by users, because now it is actually useless and cannot be used to display content.
However, let me remind you that with the shutdown of Flash, strange things began to happen in some parts of the world: for example: End of support for Adobe Flash caused interruptions in the Chinese railway system, as well as Authorities of South Africa create their own browser to continue to use Flash. It is also interesting that a special version of Flash for China turned into adware.
