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. Therefore, since Adobe will no longer be supporting Flash Player after December 31, 2020 and Adobe will block Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021, Adobe strongly recommends all users immediately uninstall Flash Player to help protect their systems.
This didn’t come as a surprise, as Adobe had announced Flash would die with three years’ advance warning. It marks the end of a long era, one that at its peak gave bored teenagers ways to keep themselves entertained in the computer lab at high school. Before you could easily get high-quality games for free on your phone, you had to settle for copyright-infringing Flash nonsense. It was great.
Anyway, Flash is gone for good and Adobe wants people to rid their computers of any remnants of it because it’s not getting security updates anymore. “Useless” and “potentially dangerous down the road” makes for a bad combo. Thankfully, Adobe has official instructions for how to uninstall Flash Player on both Windows and Mac.
Thankfully, 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.
On Mac, this was literally one button press for me. I told the program to remove Flash Player and it did just that. 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 simple message from Adobe:
Flash had a heck of a run and it’s sad to see it go. Running a program to remove it from your computer won’t feel like a real goodbye, but hey, it’s the great memories that count the most.
