Microsoft has announced a new phase in its journey to purge Flash Player from Windows 10, following its end-of-support date on December 31, 2020. A blog post from September was updated recently (via BleepingComputer) to add an indication that the Flash component will be fully removed from Windows 10 with a cumulative update coming in July.
Back in October, Microsoft released KB4577586 as a manual update, allowing users to remove Flash from Windows 10 themselves, but it hasn"t been rolled out to users automatically yet, even though Flash hasn"t been supported for a few months. In June, this update will be rolled into the cumulative update preview, which is typically rolled out in the third and fourth weeks of each month, for Windows 10 version 1809 or newer, removing Flash from the install.
If you opt not to get the preview update, KB4577586 will also be included with the July cumulative updates as part of Patch Tuesday, and every cumulative update after that. On top of that, if you install the Windows 10 May 2021 Update, or version 21H1, KB4577586 will also be installed, so you may end up removing Flash a bit earlier than that.
Flash was infamous for its frequent security issues, so now that it"s no longer useful, it makes sense for leftovers of the technology to be removed. If you don"t want to wait for it to happen automatically, you can still download KB4577586 from the Microsoft Update Catalog and remove it right now. This update is also available for Windows 8.1.