in place of Flash. The announcement was coordinated with Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Adobe announced that all major web browsers planned to officially remove the Adobe Flash Player component on December 31, 2020, and Microsoft removed it from the Windows OS in January 2021 via Windows Update. In a move to further reduce the number of Flash Player installations, Adobe added a "time bomb" to Flash to disable existing installations after January 12, 2021. In mid-2020, Flash Player started prompting users to uninstall itself. Adobe removed all existing download links for Flash installers. After January 26, 2021, all major web browsers including Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox have already permanently removed Flash support. However, Flash content continues to be accessible on the web through emulators such as Ruffle, with varying degrees of compatibility and performance, although this is not endorsed by Adobe. Web browsers Google Chrome Starting from Chrome 76, Flash is disabled by default without any prompts to activate Flash content. Users who wanted to play Flash content had to manually set a browser to prompt for Flash content, and then during each browser session enable Flash plugin for every site individually. Microsoft Edge, which is based on Chromium, followed the same plan as Google Chrome. Google Chrome blocked the Flash plugin as "out of date" in January 2021, and fully removed it from the browser with Chrome version 88, released on January 20, 2021. Mozilla Firefox Starting with Firefox 85, Flash is disabled by default without any prompts to activate Flash content. To play Flash content, users had to manually set a browser to prompt for Flash content, and then during each browser session enable Flash plugin for every site individually. Firefox 85, released on January 26, 2021, completely removed support for the Flash plugin. Firefox ESR dropped support on November 2, 2021 (Firefox 78 ESR was the last version with support). Microsoft Windows On October 27, 2020, Microsoft released an update (named KB4577586) for Windows 10 and 8.1 which removes the embedded Adobe Flash Player component from IE11 and Edge Legacy. In July 2021, this update was automatically installed as a security patch. However, an ActiveX Flash Player plugin may still be used with IE after this update is applied. Apple Safari Apple dropped Flash Player support from Safari 14 alongside the release of macOS Big Sur. Fallout Despite the years