Flash is finally dead. How to remove it.

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The time has come. The end of 2020 was seen as a positive for many, but it was bittersweet in at least one way: Adobe finally, officially killed Flash Player.

Adobe had announced Flash would end with three years’ advance warning. It marks the end of a long era, one that at its peak gave bored teenagers, training managers, even artists a platform for creativity and information distribution.

Anyway, Flash as a stand-alone player is gone for good and Adobe wants people to rid their computers of any remnants of Flash Player because it’s not getting security updates anymore.  Thankfully, Adobe has official instructions for how to uninstall Flash Player on both Windows and Mac.

The process seems pretty streamlined and simple. Adobe created a Flash Player uninstaller program that you can find in either of those two instruction pages. Obviously, make sure you download the right one for your operating system first. One you’ve done that, open the download, click the Flash Player Uninstaller icon, and let it do its magic. 

You’ll probably have to close whatever browser windows you have open, so make sure you aren’t losing any tabs you need. Once it’s done, the uninstaller app will let you know by taking you to a web page with a verifying message from Adobe.

But be aware that this uninstallation process is for the stand alone Flash player that many users have installed on their computers. This will not affect the built-in Flash player that is a part of Internet Explorer, Edge (both variants), Chrome and all its derivative browsers.

The difference is that there are times that browsers still need to play Flash content on websites. But there are also games, presentations and other content built with Flash that runs without the browser. It is this stand-alone content that will be affected.

Although Adobe will no longer support nor update the stand alone Flash program, all of the browser makers will continue to update their version already included.

At least that is for the time being.

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