Adobe Flash to remain as default in IE11 & Edge in Win10

How much did Adobe have to pay MS for that..?? 

:emotion-2:

Default?

Default for what, exactly? For content I don't need, but content that MS has decided, in its wisdom, that I do. Regardless of the security risks. I've lived without flash on my Win 7 systems for years now without regrets.

Which is why I have Pale Moon as my default browser for Win 10, without any flash plugin. Out of interest, I just went to the Adobe download site for flash, and noted that it includes pre-checked/bundled software for some McAfee security scanner, and some Intel password manager. Sheesh ...

IE is my primary browser, and as an experiment, I stopped installing Flash in it about 2 months ago.   I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was able to surf, for the most part, without Flash.   In particular, YouTube now offers most (all??) of its videos using HTML5, which supersedes Flash.

On the other hand, I discovered that a major/popular site like Facebook still relies on Flash for most of the videos there... meaning I could not view them via IE --- I had to switch to an alternate browser  (FF, in my case) where I had installed Flash.   That could explain why Microsoft is still "defaulting" to the inclusion of Flash, lest the multitude of Facebook users find (and complain) that IE/Edge becomes "useless" for their favorite social media site.

Speedtest dot net uses Flash as its primary choice for its operation... but at least, it falls back to a non-Flash beta alternative when it detects the absence of Flash.

I wasn't aware of the need for Flash at FB, as I rarely go there. So maybe there is some method in their madness.

I've always kept Flash in my non-default browser against the day I might need it - like you, speedtest dot net is about the only site I've found where it is useful also. (Interestingly, their Beta test works in IE 11, but not in Pale Moon).

MS obviously has redefined "default" to mean "mandatory", with no user option to switch or disable. Perhaps I should be grateful that MS has not (yet) made Adobe Reader (another target for malware) the default pdf reader for Win 10.

I see the Reader situation as very different:   as you're aware, there are several alternative .pdf-viewers available, including FoxIt Reader, Sumatra .pdf, and Nitro/Primo pdf.   Users can install any one of these [or some other viewer] --- of their choice ---  and be able to read .pdf documents.

In contrast, I don't know that there's any viable alternative to Flash, for sites that provide animations using Flash.   Sites like YouTube, that "bypass" Flash, do so by providing content using HTML5 format.   In time, the expectation is that all sites will switch to HTML5, at which point Flash will be rendered obsolete, and can finally die.