Microsoft recently released an optional Catalog update which removes Adobe Flash from Windows 10 and prevents it from getting installed and paves the way for the death of the app in 2021. According to Bleeping Computer, the update removes the Flash version bundled at Windows 10 instead of the standalone versions installed by the user. The update does not remove Flash from Microsoft Edge and other browsers.
The Flash support for Windows 10 will die by the end of 2020 with no more updates for Internet Explorer 11 and legacy version of Edge by December 2020. The latest version of Edge which uses the Chrome engine of Google will lose the support of Flash by January 2021. Microsoft said that they are releasing the removal update in advance to help users test and validate the environments for any impact that might be there by the removal of Adobe Flash Player.
Microsoft released a timeline for the end of Flash last month saying that the Flash removal tool will become an optional update in Windows update by 2021. Few months later, it will become a recommended update and in summer 2021, Flash-related developer frameworks, group policies and user interfaces from legacy Edge and IE11 will be removed by Microsoft and it will be done via cumulative updates among all the versions of Windows which includes Windows 10 and 8.1.
Google is also going to end support of Flash for Chrome saying that it will be dead by December 2020. Apart from this, Adobe is also ending Flash development in 2020 and will also tell people on how to uninstall it.