Three years after their announcement in July 2017, Adobe Flash Player is finally coming to an end on December 31, 2020. Now you may be wondering, “What is Flash and how is this going to affect me?” Adobe Flash is a free software that was extremely common a few years back. Flash allowed users to open and view multimedia (such as text, videos, and animations) as well as run flash games online. YouTube, for example, also used Flash back then!
However, as the years went by and technology kept improving, Flash wasn’t able to keep up. More and more websites that were once reliant on Flash moved to other standards like HTML5. Google Chrome, for example, even has Flash disabled by default. Aside from the already increasing web independence from Flash, Adobe also announced its end of life (EOL) with enough time for developers to find a workaround or improve their own. Most applications of Flash that would be affected by EOL will therefore be contained within older legacy systems.
With all EOL products, we strongly recommend removing them. Adobe will only keep Flash secure with patches until its EOL date of December 31st. This of course means Flash will be left vulnerable to potential new attacks come the new year. As such, we encourage users to take a proactive approach in uninstalling the software before that date.
If you have a Windows desktop maintained by CLAS IT, you won’t need to worry about uninstalling. If you are using anything other than that (i.e. laptop, Mac, personal machine), we would recommend uninstalling yourself.
Uninstalling Flash on Windows:
- Windows 10:
You can uninstall Flash by clicking the Start Menu>Settings (gears icon)>Apps and you’ll see Adobe Flash for you to click and uninstall if you have it. - Windows 7:
You can uninstall Flash by clicking the Start Menu>Control Panel>Uninstall a program (under Programs) and you’ll be able to click Adobe Flash and hit uninstall. - Uninstalling Flash on Macs:
Click on Finder (blue face icon)>Applications and then move Flash to the trash or right click and hit uninstall/remove.
If you run into any issues uninstalling, Adobe does provide an uninstaller for you to download and run here.