Microsoft Details the End of Flash Support for Edge

All good things must, sooner or later, come to an end. When it was announced back in 2017 that the vast majority of mainstream browsers would stop supporting ‘Flash‘, however, it must admit that it gave me more than a few nostalgic pangs of pain. Most of which, I freely admit, comes from my earlier experiences of the internet where ‘Newgrounds’ was one of the best websites around. If you’re not aware of that site (which does still exist by the way), think of it as a very early precursor to YouTube where users could submit their own ‘Flash’ based animations or games where other users could check them all out! I myself actually have a few projects still floating around on their servers somewhere.

Come the end of 2020, however, ‘Flash’ is effectively going to be dead and, in a report via Engadget, Microsoft has given us some rough details on how this will happen on Edge.

Microsoft Details the Planned Death of ‘Flash’ on Edge

With official Flash support set to end on both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge this December, in terms of the latter, the following ‘roadmap’ has been indicated:

• Official support will end in December 2020 and Flash will be disabled by default
• Any versions of Adobe ‘Flash’ released prior to June 2020 will not work at all
• Microsoft will introduce a Windows update later this year that will remove ‘Flash’ completely as an OS component. This will initially be an optional download but will later transition to a ‘recommended’ update.
• Once this update has been made, it will be irreversible. Well, not unless you offline install an old version of Windows 10.
• While Flash will still be available on Internet Explorer 11 and the old (non-Chromium) version of Edge, this support will end around Summer 2021.

What Do We Think?

It should be noted that ‘Flash’ will still be able to work on both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge after 2020. It will, however, require the installation of a separate plug-in that, as you might have guessed, would not be officially supported. More so, you do of course run the risk of potential security flaws which is what primarily sparked its intended removal in the first place.

Noting that there are still more than a few websites out there that apparently use a ‘Flash’ based interaction design, however, they’re clearly going to have to do something pretty quickly. Like it or not, ‘Flash’ (as a mainstream application) only has around 3 months left to live!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!