They tried, on a smaller scale, with dropping the Linux NPAPI plugin. Unfortunately, they were unable to manage even that, and ended up resuming updates to it

They tried, on a smaller scale, with dropping the Linux NPAPI plugin. Unfortunately, they were unable to manage even that, and ended up resuming updates to it after several years, since so many security vulns kept popping up in it. The major browsers are trying to leverage their forced-upgrade strategems to increasingly isolate Flash content (click-to-play, locking it in increasingly-harsh sandboxes and throwing away the keys...), because the problem was never convincing _Adobe_ to kill Flash. It was, is, and will remain convincing users who have run sites with it forever to migrate off. There are enterprise device web interfaces written in Java applets or Flash (or, on rare occasion, both), that are past EOL but still in use in a great number of locations. There are many "applications" that are just embedded web browsers doing the above dance. Flash has been around 20 years - it'll probably take at least another 10 after Adobe absolutely stops any updates (which, I think, would take either a transparent migration tool or a bankruptcy), if not more, before seeing Flash becomes an abnormality.