In the wake of Adobe’s announcement about the end of life of Flash, Microsoft this week announced its own schedule for removing Flash from its own products.

“Adobe announced that Flash will no longer be supported after 2020,” the Microsoft Edge teamexplains. “Microsoft will phase out support for Flash in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer ahead of this date.”

After some unnecessarily kind words about Flash, which is the most reviled technology available on the Internet (and, yes, I do remember ActiveX), Microsoft provided the following schedule.

End of 2017 through early 2018. Microsoft Edge will ask users for permission to run Flash on most sites the first time the site is visited, as it does today. And it will remember the user’s preference on future visits. Internet Explorer will continue to allow Flash normally.

Mid-to-late 2018. Microsoft Edge will require explicit permission for Flash to run every time it’s encountered. IE will continue to allow Flash normally.

Mid-to-late 2019. Flash will be disabled by default in both Microsoft Edge and IE, but users will be able to re-enable it in both. If re-enabled, Edge will continue to require approval for Flash on a site-by-site basis.

By the end of 2020. Microsoft Edge and IE will no longer support Flash. Users will not be able enable or run Flash in either browser.

Microsoft says that it is phasing out Flash support ahead of Adobe’s end-of-life date, which is also at the end of 2020. But these schedules appear to match almost perfectly, and Microsoft’s schedule is basically the same as that of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

Tagged with Adobe, Flash, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge