Adobe has released on Tuesday the last update ever for its iconic Flash Player app, which the company plans to retire at the end of the year.
"In the latest Flash Player update released yesterday, we updated our uninstall prompt language and functionality to encourage people to uninstall Flash Player before the end of life and to help make users aware that beginning January 12, 2021, Adobe will block Flash content from running," an Adobe spokesperson told ZDNet.
The update follows through with changes Adobe announced earlier this year in June.
At the time, Adobe said it planned to show prompts to all Flash users[1] by the end of the year with a notification that the software will soon reach its planned end-of-life [EOL].
The new update also brings an actual date to Flash's actual demise in the form of January 12, 2021 — the date after which any type of Flash content won't run inside the Flash app.
Skipping this last Flash update won't remove this "time bomb," however.
Adobe told ZDNet that the killswitch code was added months before in previous releases and that this last Flash update only modifies the language used in the prompt that will ask users to uninstall the app.
End of the road
The Flash EOL was first announced in July 2017 when Adobe[2], Apple[3], Google[4], Microsoft[5], Mozilla[6], and Facebook[7] agreed to phase out Flash-based content and technologies from their products.
At the time of writing, all major browsers have already disabled Flash in their products and are set to remove the actual Flash plugin from their codebases throughout December 2020 and January 2021.
Facebook has already pushed most of its hosted games from Flash to