If you’re like the majority of users, you go about your daily business with Adobe’s Flash Player disabled in the Chrome browser. The antiquated media player has had its head on the chopping block for nearly three years now and Google announced that sometime near the end of 2020, Flash support would be fully removed from Chrome and Chrome OS. Even Adobe recognizes that it’s time to retire the dinosaur that served us well for more than two decades.
However, in this weird time that we find ourselves living in, Flash has found itself just “mostly dead” and as we all know, mostly dead is slightly alive. (If you get that, we can be friends.) It came to my attention this morning that there are quite a few websites out there that still use the Flash Player and many of them are educational resource websites. Now that millions of students are doing the homeschooling thing, a lot of these free websites are being utilized by teachers to help aid and assist in distance learning. Great! Problem is, Flash is disabled by default on Chrome and it occurred to me that the average American may not know how to remedy that problem. Below, you can see an example from a site that my daughter’s school is currently using for non-traditional learning time.
So, how do you turn Flash back on if you need it for the time being? There are a couple of different paths to enable Flash but due to the fact that it will soon disappear from the web, I recommend using the per-site method. When you have navigated to a trusted site that is using Flash and you are greeted with the above warning, you can “unblock” Flash by following these simple steps. For demonstration purposes, we will use the site I mentioned above. It is the site, Sheppard Software. The Flash Player is blocked on the math game page here. When you are on the page with the blocked Flash Player, follow these steps to enable Flash for that particular site.
- Click the “lock” icon to the left of the website address
- Click “Site settings”
- In the page that opens, find Flash and select “Allow” from the dropdown
- Go back to the original page and you should see a “Reload” button at the top of the page.
- Click Reload and Flash should now be enabled for that entire site.
If, in the future, you wish to disable Flash, you can simply follow the same steps from above and choose “Block” from the dropdown. I know this seems like a simple thing but I also know many users normally don’t even think about Flash being disabled in the browser, let alone how to re-enable it. Hopefully, if you’ve experienced this speed bump, this quick-tip will get you up an running again.
