Last Updated on December 26, 2022 by Mathew Diekhake

The Adobe Flash Player, known as Shockwave Flash for Firefox users, has been a vital piece of software that many websites require before you can watch videos. At the same time, it’s also software that has been criticized by many for a lack of security.

For a long time, Google Chrome came with Abode Flash Player enabled by default. It was one of the few web browsers to offer this natively and without any questions asked for a number of years. However, even it doesn’t do that anymore, and you would need to enable it from Chrome if you want to use it.

Like Google Chrome, the Microsoft Edge web browser has the Adobe Flash Player disabled by default, and you need to enable it when you want to use it.

It seems now that most of the web browsers out there agree that Adobe Flash Player does have some serious security concerns, but at the same time, there are still many websites out there that require Flash Player for you to be able to view their content, so they don’t really have a choice but to offer you a way to enable it.

If you do decide to enable the Flash Player for your web browser, you want to make sure you trust the website that you’re viewing. If the site looks overly suspicious, and you are getting lots of browser warnings about it being up to no good, and it’s asking for you to enable Flash as well before you can see stuff, which can be a common occurrence on sports streaming website that show illegal feeds, then that might be something you want to reconsider viewing.

There will still be many websites that may set off alarm bells that aren’t up to anything fishy as well. Just because websites request you use Flash Player, even the dodgy looking ones, doesn’t mean they’re doing it for any other reason apart from just trying to show you a video. Some might think that because it seems as though the websites that are continuing to use it is promoting these web browsers to continue to support it means that it is the websites which are creating the issues, but that’s not necessarily true either. Adobe is a big company, worth billions of dollars, and large enough for the CEO to have been invited by Trump to the White House to attend a meeting with only a select few CEOs in the United States gathered around the table. It makes a lot of money from its products—into the billions. Money means a lot in this business because it means they can employ the best people for the jobs. It’s not clear why Abode isn’t addressing the security concerns (perhaps they can’t) and why other brands aren’t creating products to knock Adobe Flash Player of its perch (maybe it isn’t possible). It’s really just a judgment call and impossible to tell which sites are up to no good with regards to Flash Player, so make sure that you have your antivirus turned on and continually running those automatic scans for your computer.

How to Enable or Disable Adobe Flash Player in Microsoft Edge in Windows 10

You can turn the Adobe Flash Player on and off in Microsoft Edge in Windows 10 by using the Edge settings from its hub. To see what I mean, open the Microsoft Edge web browser, view any webpage of your choice, and click the “three dots” in the top right-hand corner of Edge’s display, known as the hub.

With the hub open, click on the “Settings” link at the bottom of the menu.

Scroll down a bit and then click on the “Advanced settings” button from the settings.

Now look for the “Use Adobe Flash Player” toggle that you can enable and disable. When you turn this toggle on, it will enable the Flash Player.

Refresh the webpage you are viewing before you try to get the Adobe Flash Player to start working.

Microsoft having disabled Flash ever since Windows 10 build 15002 means you should find better security and performance, but just as important was leaving the users a chance to turn it back on when they need it.

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