How To Enable/Disable Flash Player in Microsoft Edge

Adobe’s famous Flash Player is often the blaming point for the back doors left open for hackers to come in. In the recent incident, Adobe has patched Flash for 38 different Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), three of which were identified as zero-day exploits that were found in the breached materials of Italian security vendor Hacking Team.

While there are still tons of the websites using Flash technology to deliver the interactive content, Microsoft Edge has its built-in so you don’t need to install 3rd party client to integrate. The browser gets more control over what gets installed.

You as the end-user also get the control whether to use it or not. In other words, you can simply disable it so no flash content gets to display in Edge. And you can do so very easily.

Click … button at the top right corner in browser, and Settings, scroll down a little until you see “View advanced settings“, and click on it. From there, you will see an option called “Use Adobe Flash Player” that you can toggle on and off.

Once it’s off, the change takes place right away. Next time when you visit a page that utilizes Flash player, you will see something like this instead.

And don’t bother trying “Download Adobe Flash” link. It won’t work in Microsoft Edge.

So how to double-check to make sure if it’s get updated and is safe to turn back on?

The Adobe Flash Player Utility that Microsoft Edge uses is located at following location:

C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash

You can open File Explorer on Windows 10 and navigate to that location. Or open Task Manager, right-click Adobe Flash Player Utility under Process tab and choose “Open file location” to go in.

Once in that folder, right-click the executable file and choose Properties. Under Details tab, you can verify the File version to make sure it matches the latest version released by Adobe. As of now, 18.0.0.209 is the latest one that has the zero-day breach patched up.

So, as long as you have the latest patch updated, you are OK to re-enable Adobe Flash in Microsoft Edge.