Tuesday 12 January 2021

Flash player

 


The end of flash player. 

Technically the phase out started quite sometime ago, when apple stopped supporting flash in 2010 (still remember the "cannot learn the move flash" meme?). Then NPAPI was gone in 2015-16. Then mainstream browsers started creating difficulty for one using flash. Adobe officially stopped supporting Flash by the end of 2020 and now chrome is stupidly blocking flash.

But I am sure there are many who would like to use flash anyhow for whatever good ol' online materials. It could be flash games in Kongregate, Neopets or Asiadog, flash vids from Newgrounds and oocities archives, or the for once state-of-the-art flash online RPG the Adventure Quest (AQ).

All you need is a get around, and here is one.

Before windows officially work against flash, the main obstacle would be flash player itself and the browser, so we need to deal with them separately.

Disclaimer: there are security problems with flash itself, even more for the older versions. This is the primary reason why it was phased out in the first place, so use at your own risk.

Flash: install a much older version of flash with update disabled.

The current one might have been disabled/uninstalled by windows/flash itself. What you want to do is to uninstall the current one (if it is still there) and install an older version. 

The reason to get old versions is to prevent adobe putting anything related to end the use of flash player into the software. In that sense any version that is more than a few years old should be fine. I tested 15.0 and 18.0 and they both worked for me, but I suspect something more recent should also work. 

I got myself the old installer from my old download stuff, but I am sure there are archived installer online with some simple googling.

Browser: DO NOT USE CHROME. Firefox and IE should be fine. Vivaldi maybe?

The picture of flash blocked that everyone posted is a result of chrome blocking flash, not that flash blocked itself. That basically means that there is no hope using flash with chrome unless you downgrade it significantly. 

I experimented with Firefox and it works even on the latest version (at least for now, not sure if flash ban is also scheduled for Firefox). Allow flash to run and disable any update prompts. You should have no problem running flash from there.

If you use modern browsers then you would like flash player that supports PPAPI (or flash for Firefox/chrome, simply speaking). If you are using old browsers then you will need flash player that supports NPAPI.

I feel like modern browsers have problem coping with really old flash versions (8/11/12), that's understandable because PPAPI were not fully established at the time, but it's also weird considering that almost everything in Neopets were build well before these flash versions.

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It is definitely an incorrect approach to force the users to adapt something else by mandatory updates including updates from windows and chrome, and of course finishing flash this time. Sadly it has been the practice of those IT giants, among many of their ignorant moves.

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