Microsoft has announced that the new Microsoft Edge will follow the same Adobe Flash retirement roadmap as Chrome and other chromium-based browsers.
In July 2017, Adobe announced that it plans to retire Adobe Flash in December 2020 and it will also stop updating and distributing the software. In a
coordinated announcement, all major browser makers including Microsoft and Google also revealed their plans to retire Flash in their browsers.
In this announcement, Microsoft stated that by the end of 2020, users would
no longer have the ability to enable Adobe Flash in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer.
"By the end of 2020, we will remove the ability to run Adobe Flash in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer across all supported versions of Microsoft Windows. Users will no longer have any ability to enable or run Flash."
Since this announcement, Microsoft began the development of a new Chromium-based Edge browser and has therefore decided to follow
Google's roadmap for removing Adobe Flash from the browser. For the most part, this experience is similar to the plans already laid out by Microsoft.
"In the next version of Microsoft Edge (built on Chromium), we will continue to retire Flash in the same time frame as other Chromium-based browsers," Microsoft stated in
an announcement. "You can learn more about that timeline
in this blog post. Flash will initially be disabled, and the user will need to re-enable Flash on a site-by-site basis; Flash will be completely removed from the browser towards the end of 2020.
Group policies are available for enterprise admins and IT pros to change the Flash behavior prior to that date."
The classic Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11 will continue to have full flash functionality in 2019 and the company will not make any further changes to these legacy browser's current Flash experience. For these browsers, Flash will be entirely removed by December 2020. as originally planned.
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