Old Edge Is Gone, and So Is Flash
Microsoft's March Patch Tuesday quietly retired legacy Edge and expanded the rollout that strips Flash Player out of Windows for good.
Yesterday’s Patch Tuesday did more than the usual pile of CVE fixes. If you were one of the holdouts still running the old EdgeHTML-based Microsoft Edge on Windows 10, that browser is gone as of this update — Microsoft replaced it outright with the Chromium-based Edge that’s been the default for a while now. And in the same cumulative update, Microsoft widened the rollout of the patch that fully removes Adobe Flash Player from the system.
This has been telegraphed for months, so nobody should be shocked. Adobe killed Flash at the end of 2020, and Microsoft announced back then that it would ship an update to yank the runtime out of Windows entirely rather than leave a dead, unpatched plugin sitting around as an attack surface. Old Edge’s death was similarly scheduled — Microsoft has been nudging users toward Chromium Edge since last year, and this patch is the part where nudging turns into “it’s just not there anymore.”
Why this matters more than a typical version bump
Both of these removals are really about shrinking attack surface. EdgeHTML Edge was a dead-end engine that Microsoft had stopped meaningfully investing in, and an abandoned browser engine is exactly the kind of thing that quietly accumulates unpatched vulnerabilities. Flash’s history speaks for itself — it was one of the most exploited pieces of software of the last two decades. Getting rid of both in one motion is a reasonable, if overdue, bit of housekeeping.
For most home users this should be invisible. If you’ve been using Chromium Edge already (which has been the default install for a year-plus), you won’t notice anything except maybe a shortcut disappearing. If your organization was intentionally holding onto legacy Edge for some internal compatibility reason, though, today is the day that decision gets forced.
The rough edges
It wouldn’t be a Patch Tuesday without a side of collateral damage. Along with the dozens of vulnerabilities this cumulative update addressed, reports are already surfacing of printer problems and blue-screen crashes tied to the same update. Microsoft is aware and working on follow-up fixes, but if you manage machines at scale, this is a good week to hold off on rushing deployment to every endpoint and to keep an eye out for print-spooler weirdness or unexpected reboots before you declare victory.
The bigger picture here is a browser and OS ecosystem that’s finally closing out two long-running liabilities. Old Edge and Flash both had a good run relative to how long they should have lasted, and it’s hard to be sad to see either go — even with a patch cycle that stumbled a bit on the way out the door. If you’re responsible for a fleet of Windows machines, this is worth testing before broad deployment, and if you’re just a regular user, you likely won’t even notice the funeral.