It has been made clear that Adobe will display a prompt on the PC screen to remove Flash Player this year, which Adobe announced on December 31, 2020 that it will end distribution and updates.
According to the Adobe Flash Player end of support information page that Adobe posted on its website, after December 31, 2020, not only will the update offer but also download the Flash player will be unavailable. After that, you cannot install a new flash player.
In the future, it is said that Flash-based content blocks Adobe Flash Player from running, disables it, and is not responsible for Flash Player that can be used afterwards. Flash Player is often targeted by hacking or malware, and security updates are still provided regularly, so it is presumed that Adobe has decided to stop providing support after the end date in consideration of user safety.
Therefore, even if you can download a Flash player through a website that is suspicious somewhere and play content, you should absolutely avoid using it. In addition, open standards such as HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly are already spreading in web browsers.
I don’t know how the prompt to remove Adobe’s Flash player will be displayed, but if a message suddenly comes out one day, you need to be calm. If something is displayed, there is a possibility that a malicious code disguised as a message to remove it may come out, so it seems that there will be no problem if you update the Windows security at this time.
According to W3Techs, a web research company, the rate of using Flash on websites currently accounts for 2.6% of the total. In 2011, the year after Steve Jobs explained in detail why the iPhone didn’t support Flash, its share of Flash fell to 28%. Also, in February 2018, Chrome browser statistics revealed that the percentage of people who read Flash content at least once a day fell from 80% in 2014 to less than 8% in early 2018.
It would be surprising if you had memories of creating webpages with multimedia functions using Flash in the early days of macromedia in the Internet, but now HTML5 and surrounding technologies are capable of expressing equal or better than Flash. As Steve Jobs refused to support Flash in the iPhone, it could be seen that the boundaries of the means of content expression on the web and mobile have changed. At the time, YouTube and Facebook also used Flash to provide content, but as HTML5 spreads, the position of Flash players gradually narrowed. Now, even Adobe admits that Flash is a burden and is pushing the transition to HTML5.