How do I uninstall Adobe Flash from my Macintosh?

Is there any software on the Internet that's more controversial than Adobe Flash? I don't think so. Apple's said it's too slow, so Flash isn't supported on iPads and iPhones, for example. A market slice that encompasses over 25-million devices. That's a lot, however you rationalize it.

Then again, I've also seen some amazing sites written in Flash and certainly there are some very cool 3D animations too. You've seen them, I'm sure. For one thing, most of the current theatrical release sites are written in Flash. You can tell, they don't work on the iPad!

Anyway!

To remove Adobe Flash, your best bet is to simply download and install the Adobe Flash Uninstaller for Mac.

Once it's downloaded, you'll see the Uninstaller show up on its own virtual drive:

Double click to launch the app.

No, really, it's good. Click on "Open" to proceed.

That looks good. But it's a bit more confusing than you may expect. Click on "UNINSTALL" to proceed and you'll need to enter your administrative password:

Next up, the Adobe Flash Uninstaller for Mac will tell you what's stopping it from proceeding:

What makes this confusing is that the helper app "PluginProcess" isn't one you can actually kill because it's not a user-level process in the first place. To proceed, you need to quit your Web browser (I recommend you switch to it and quit it normally, rather than using the "Force Close All", which is a bit aggressive and can cause you to lose some of your most recent work or changes).

Now the warning gets even more weird:

My experience was that if I just waited a minute or so, the process died without any intervention, probably because it's actually a helper app for Safari. Don't want to wait? Click on "Force Close All" after all.

Once you can proceed, it'll automatically move to the next step:

And after a minute or three, you'll get:

Done. That's it.

Want to check that it worked correctly? Simply go to the About Flash page at Adobe. What you should see is the following:

Key to see here is "Missing Plug-in" on the right.

Deleting or uninstalling simply so you can reinstall and try to fix some Flash hiccups? Yeah, done that too. Grab the latest version from Adobe at Get Flash! and installation is as easy as one, two three. Or it should be. :-)

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