How To Set Up Adobe Flash Player On Mac For Chrome

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A few weeks ago I started using Chrome on Mac OS X as my main Web browser. I had grown tired of Safari 4 chewing up nearly a gig of RAM after leaving it open for a week or more. Don't get me wrong, Safari is a fantastic browser and I wasn't happy about switching. But I can't have any browser chew through a gig of memory even if it takes it a week to do so. Chrome is nearly as fast as Safari (for me) and I've left it open for two weeks without any tab hogging memory. Each opened tab spawns its own process allowing a single tab to fail without affecting other tabs. In general I've found each tab occupies 25 MB to 40 MB of RAM. If you do that math you'll realize I can open around 25-40 tabs before Chrome takes up a gig of RAM.

Enough about my reasons for switching to Chrome, this post is about the Flash Player running in Chrome.

Player

My Flash videos just aren’t working right in Google Chrome. How do I fix it? Flash is an application made by Adobe that displays movies, games, or other content within a web browser. It’s an old web standard that’s slowly being phased out by HTML5 — however, many websites still use Flash plugins for videos, games, and tools.

Flash

How Do You Set Up Adobe Flash Player

When I switched to Chrome I quickly realized the debugger version of the Flash Player wasn't being used. When I attempted to run a step debugging process Flash Builder 4 displayed a notification warning me I wasn't running a debugger version of the player. I validated this claim using Adobe's Flash Player version checker.

How To Set Up Adobe Flash

This seemed really odd to me since I knew I was running a debug version of the player. I launched Safari and loaded the Flash Player version checker and it said I was running the debug version. So I checked in Firefox and received the same result. Why was Safari and Firefox using a debugger player but Chrome wasn't. As far as I understood things every browser on OS X looked in the /Library/Internet Plug-ins/ for two files: Flash Player.plugin and flashplayer.xpt. Whichever versions of these files you had in the directory dictated your installed Flash Player version.

  1. Enable Adobe Flash Player on Firefox 1) Open your Firefox browser, on the top-right corner, click the three-bar icon and click Add-ons. 2) On the left side, click Plugins. Then click Shockwave Flash and select Always Activate from the drop-down menu. 3) If you want to disable it, just click Never activate. Enable Adobe Flash Player on Opera 1) Open a blank page in Opera. Press the Settings button.
  2. Make sure that Prefer HTML over Flash and Run all Flash content when Flash setting is set to “allow” are set to Default. Open another tab and type in chrome://components. Under Adobe Flash Player, click the Check for update button. Now click on the Chrome menu button at the top right and click on Settings.

That's when I remembered Chrome has its own embedded version of Flash Player and it manages this version of the player without input from you. This is good and bad. Casual Chrome users receive automatic updates to the Flash Player which can be useful when there are critical Flash Player security updates. For programmers writing software for the Flash Player this feature isn't so good.

How To Set Up Adobe Flash Player On Windows 7

I dug through Chrome preferences and found the screen at Preferences - Under the Hood - Content Settings (button) - Plugins - Disable individual plug-ins (text). A faster way to get to this configuration screen is to enter chrome://plugins/ in your address bar. After disabling the default Chrome-managed version of Flash Player the Adobe Flash Player version checker reported the correct debugger version. I was now able to debug Flex applications in Flash Builder 4, though it still told me I wasn't running a debugger player.

Flash Player

For those who wind up disabling the default player like I did, be warned. Chrome automatically updates it's default Flash Player and when it does the plugin is re-enabled. And since the plugin is listed higher on the Plugins page, this version of the plugin takes precedence when two different versions are enabled. You may want to check from time to time to verify you are still running a debug version. Just today I had to disable the default plugin again.