Adobe Flash Player: how to check if the plugin is uninstalled

So you need to verify NOW that Adobe Flash Player is no longer running on your PC

Adobe no longer supports Flash Player with immediate effect. This makes the plugin a security risk in the browser. Here you can find out how to remove the program and what alternatives are available.

The turn of the year heralded the end of one of the most popular browser add-ons. The Adobe Flash Player is no longer officially maintained. For a long time it was an integral part of the Internet: whether they were advertising banners, minigames or interactive websites, in the 1990s in particular, these elements were almost always displayed via Flash. For some years now, the format has been rarely used on the Internet; however, the plug-in is still installed on many computers. The once important Flash Player has become a security risk. How the decline occurred and how to get rid of the plugin now.

The long death of Flash Player

Ten years ago it was unthinkable to use the Internet without Flash. This had mainly to do with the fact that the format originally developed by Macromedia (Adobe bought the company in 2005) offered web designers great creative freedom, and the result was the same across browsers. That alone was not a natural thing at the time: shortly after the turn of the millennium, almost no browser adhered to the standards when displaying HTML pages, so websites in different browsers sometimes looked completely different if not they adapted with a lot of manual work.

Flash elements, on the other hand, always looked the same because they used their own format and were not displayed in the browser itself, but in a plug-in. But Flash content required computing power and data bandwidth; it was a poison for mobile devices. Apple, for example, refused to support Flash on the iPhone or iPad. YouTube dealt the fatal blow to the format in 2015 when the platform switched its video playback from Flash to HTML5. Two years later, Adobe announced that the Flash player would only remain until the end of 2020. The company has now implemented this announcement.

How to uninstall Flash Player

In recent years, Flash Player has repeatedly been the gateway to malware. Should new security holes emerge, Adobe will no longer fix them; therefore, you must urgently get rid of Flash Player if it is still active on your own computer. You can find out if this is the case on this page from Adobe. Chrome users see, for example, that Flash Player is pre-installed in the browser but is disabled. Users don’t have to do anything else here: the built-in Flash Player will be completely removed from the browser at the end of support, as Google announced in 2017. Adobe also shows on this page how to disable or enable the Flash plug-in in the various browsers. In some cases, the Flash variants have also been removed through Windows updates.

If, on the other hand, you find an installed version of Flash Player, you can remove it using an uninstaller. Adobe explains here where to get the program and how to use it.

What’s next with Flash content?

If you want to continue using Flash content in the future, it won’t be easy, because even those who ignore urgent security warnings will soon no longer be able to use Adobe’s Flash Player – as of January 12, 2021, Adobe will block the playback of Flash content . active in your Flash Player.

The flash games that the Internet Archive offers on its website through an emulator are perhaps a small consolation. The Ruffle software project is also very promising: a secure alternative to Flash Player is being developed here. However, currently only “nightly builds” are available, that is, very early versions of the program without testing. However, this is far from adequate for average users. It remains to be seen if Ruffle could be an alternative for them in the future.

(t-online / jnm)