As you well know, also since you found yourself reading a random article on Medium that says “How to still use Flash Player in 2021”, Flash Player has been shot down by Adobe and it is no longer possible to use it if you use the main browsers.
Someone says luckily, someone says unfortunately, but if you are here reading this article, I really think you see yourself in the second category of people.
Although as early as 2017 Adobe declared it would completely cease support for Flash Player in 2020 (EOL), a large part of the content on the web has remained anchored to this technology and no migration to new standards such as HTML5 has been implemented.
In fact, many games, sites and technologies built in the golden age of Flash are not updated to new technologies for various reasons, such as costs, timing, users no longer present, etc.
Many satellite projects, however, were born with the declaration of making Flash Player die. As usual the internet always proves to be ready to face the abandonment of software that can no longer be maintained by large companies. An interesting project that I want to recommend for the nostalgic of the first flash games very popular in the early 2000s is Bluemaxima, a site that has taken care of preserving over 80000 flash games that have populated the network until to date.
But why still Flash Player?
While everyone’s advice is to uninstall any flash plugins you have installed on your machines and leave behind this sad story that was Flash Player, someone still needs to use it.
There are still many companies that for one reason or another have not yet updated. My problem comes from here. In the company where they recently hired me, I have to take a course hosted by a well-known American IT company. Needless to say, the whole course is based on flash player.
Looking around the web I saw that my case is more common than it seems and after about half an hour of headache between posts on reddit and various sites I found a solution that I want to share here with you through my first article on Medium, so be lenient if it sucks you, I just wanted to help some desperate like me.
The solution
The solution (thanks to this post and its user on Reddit) consists in downloading Palemoon, a browser based on Firefox which, unlike the latter, has not ceased support for the NPAPI architecture, which is the one on which the development of Flash Player plugins for Firefox is based.
Through this procedure you will be able to create yourself a portable version of the browser to be able to browse whenever you want on your favorite flash sites or anyway you need.
- Download Palemoon Portable for Windows from the Official Site.
- Download the Flash Player for your architecture.
- Extract Palemoon portable and the Flash Player plugin.
- Put the NPSWF*.dll in /Lib/Mozilla/Plugins.
- Aaaaaaaaaaand done.
Now you have your portable version of Palemoon, ready to visit any site using Flash. Obviously it is intuitive to tell all the security problems you may encounter, so my advice is to use this browser only to browse the flash contents that you cannot navigate from classic browsers.
Cheers!
