Firefox users who want Adobe Flash to view videos, play games or access other Flash based contents do not need to install Flash for that functionality. There is an easier and safer way.

The following guide works for Windows based portable Firefox versions. The process has two steps. The Flash plugin needs to be downloaded first, before it can be added to Firefox. Adding in this case means making it recognizable by the browser without installation.

Open another web browser or download manager and download the Flash plugin from the official Macromedia website. The plugin comes in a format that Firefox would prompt to install instead of download. Downloading it in another web browser is therefor the best solution.

The next step is to unpack the flashplayer-win.xpi file. Most unpackers like 7-Zip will have no problems unpacking the file. Users who encounter troubles should consider adding a .zip extension to the file, before trying to extract the files to the local computer system.

Locate the dynamic link library NPSWF32.dll in the extracted files, and move it to the Data > Plugins directory of the Firefox installation. Restart the browser, and check the plugins section to see if the Flash plugin has been recognized.

This is done by going to Tools > Add-ons, and switching to the Plugins tab in the new window. Another possibility would be to visit a Flash powered site to see it in action. Users should not encounter any difficulties if they have followed the instructions to the letter.

The only drawback of this method is that Flash needs to be updated manually whenever a new version becomes available.

First statistics are now in and they do look impressive. On a global scale more than 10 million Firefox users have clicked on the Flash update link posted on the What’s new page shown after Firefox updates in one week. The Mozilla developers have published a graph displaying the overall page traffic, the amount of Firefox users with and without the latest Flash version and the click through rate of those without.

The graph shows that about half of the users who accessed that page in the first week had an outdated version of the Adobe Flash player. Between 27% and 40% of these users clicked on the link that lead them to the Adobe page to update their Flash player. This does on the other hand mean that the majority did not click on the link to update Flash which indicates that there might be room for presentation improvements to get more users to click on that link.

Users who want to test their Flash version can head over to the Adobe website to do so.