How to install Adobe Flash Player

Updated at: Jul 13, 2022

Adobe Flash is now "End of Life"

As of December 31, 2020, Adobe has stopped supporting Flash Player. It's no longer possible to download it from Adobe's website and Adobe won't be releasing any new versions or security fixes for it.

Additionally, as of January 12, 2021, even if you have Flash Player already installed, it won't run Flash files any more, thus rendering it completely "End of Life".

Old list of guides to install Flash

It's no longer possible to download Flash from Adobe's website, and web browsers will probably soon automatically remove it, but for old-time's sake, we've kept our list of guides for how to install it here. If you ever build a time machine and travel back to 2006, we hope the guides are helpful! :)

Do I need to install Flash?

No.

In fact, you probably can't. Adobe no longer lets you download the latest version from their website, and recent versions of it were programmed to stop working in early 2021. Read more about the end of Flash

Learn about Adobe Flash

Once upon a time, Flash made the internet amazing

When the internet first started to gain popular awareness in the mid 1990's, a lot was written about how it would revolutionalise entertainment, communication, and learning. But lets be honest, those early days of the internet were pretty rudimentary, mostly text based, and unless you were a super-geek you probably didn't find it all that appealing...

But when Flash rose to popularity in the 2000s it changed a lot; After you performed a "one-off" installation of the Flash Player plugin in to your web browser, suddenly you could use all sorts of advanced games, interactive websites, videos and programs directly from websites which "just ran" - no mucking around, or worrying about Operating System compatibility and so on, it just worked.

There were other browser based, cross platform technologies which promised similar things, but they just didn't have the same impact at the time that Flash did. JavaScript wasn't powerful enough at that stage, and Java Applets required more programming skills to create, tended to be slower and simply failed to have the same impact and uptake as Flash.

Later versions of Flash made video streaming possible and easy (...relatively speaking!) - Flash was one of the foundations of the early days of Youtube and was used very widely by lots of streaming and educational sites. In the early days of Facebook gaming, most of the games were written in Flash too.

Very memorably, Flash also let content creators easily create funny, entertaining, and captivating games and movies. There was a golden age of this kind of internet content in the 2000s.

It wasn't all good though

Flash was frequently plagued by security problems, and especially towards the end of its life it developed a well founded reputation of being a security nightmare.

In 2010, the CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs decided to not support Flash on the iPhone (which was exploding in popularity at the time). For a lot of people this was very controversial and Steve wrote an article called Thoughts on Flash where he outlines the reasons that Apple chose not to support Flash on mobile.

The evolving technology landscape...

In the 2010's, JavaScript and HTML continued to get more powerful and website creators started to shift away from relying on Flash to deliver advanced functionality and instead focused more on using native web browser technology. Combined with Apple's decision to not support Flash on iPhone (and later iPad), and continuing security problems, Flash continued to lose market share. In 2015, Adobe themselves called for software developers and companies to start to move away from Flash to more open standards such as HTML5.

The end of Flash

In July 2017, Adobe announced the plan to stop developing Flash. It was announced that the end of 2020 would also be the end of Flash, thus giving several years notice to companies who relied on Flash to move to using more modern technology to deliver their services.

Now that we've reached the deadline of January 1, 2021, Flash is officially "End of Life". It can't be downloaded from Adobe's website and more, there won't be any more security patches provided, and as of January 12, 2021, even if you have Flash Player already installed, it won't run Flash files any more.

What happens now?

Hopefully not much!

Flash has been considered "old" technology for many years now, so hopefully most websites have migrated to using more modern technology to deliver their content by now. In most cases Flash finally going away now shouldn't be a big problem for most people.

Browsers and Operating Systems will start to automatically remove Flash

Chrome has included a "sandboxed" version of Flash built into it since 2012, so you can expect that future versions of Chrome will have this removed completely at some point in the near future.

Microsoft have announced that they will release an optional update to Windows which will remove Flash for you. The most recent "Developer Preview" versions of Safari have completely had Flash support removed, so the next version of Safari is certain to also not support Flash.

Other browsers will definitely drop support soon too. The days of Flash are over!

Goodbye Flash Player

In it's prime, Flash was amazing technology. Thank you to everyone who helped develop and support it, and thanks to all the amazing creators who made the Flash movies and games that amused us back in the day.

Flash content lives on!

An open source Flash Player emulator named "Ruffle" was started in 2016 by a software developer named Mike Welsh; since then he and a team of developers have worked on it and it's now at a point where it's a feasible replacement for Adobe's Flash Player. One of the really cool things about it is that for it to work, you don't even need to install any plugins/extensions - it works natively in most modern web browsers.

Recently there has been an amazing effort by The Internet Archive and the Ruffle developers to preserve some of the most popular and influential Flash animations and games so that the end of Flash Player and the web browsers that supported it doesn't mean losing the ability to enjoy those old Flash animations.

The Internet Archive have a blog post about their collection of Flash Animations. If you'd like to relive the glory days of early internet animation craziness (or experience it for the first time) you can browse their showcase or their entire collection of Flash files.