If you look at the plugin listing in the Chrome web browser you may notice that the Flash listing says something like Flash (3 files) or Flash (2 files). You need to click on Details on the page to see what’s going on there.

You may notice that multiple Flash plugins are loaded in the Chrome web browser instead of just the native plugin. You can click on the Disable or Enable links to disable or enable specific Flash versions in the browser. This can be handy for Flash developers who need to test their applications in a different version of Flash, and for end users who do not want multiple running plugins in the owser.

Multiple enabled Flash plugin versions in the browser are not a problem according to Google.

It’s normal to see two Flash files in about:plugins. When both are listed as enabled, Google Chrome uses the built-in version by default, so you shouldn’t have to specify which one to use unless you specifically want Chrome to use the system version instead (has ‘NPSWF32.dll’ in the location field). Keep in mind that if you use the system version, you’re responsible for keeping Flash updated while the built-in version will update automatically via Chrome’s auto-update mechanism.

If multiple Flash plugins are enabled and the native plugin is one of them, then that plugin is used to display Flash contents in the Google Chrome web browser. This does not explain why a second Flash plugin is enabled in the browser, as it does not make sense if the native Flash plugin is always used if active.

My suggestion would be to disable the non-native Flash plugin in Chrome to be on the safe side.

Adobe’s Flash Player needs elevated rights during installation, if the user has only standard rights it cannot be installed; At least not the standard way.

Lets assume you have access rights to use a computer at school, work or a public place, maybe on a company laptop or at a school library. A web browser is available but the Flash plugin is not installed so that you cannot access Flash based content sites such as Youtube.

Please note that this method works perfectly fine if Firefox is the web browser used on the system. It is unlikely that Chrome or Opera are installed on the system, but workarounds exist for these browsers as well.

If you are a Firefox user and want to use Flash but do not have administrative privileges do the following:

• Download the latest version of the Firefox Flash plugin from the official Macromedia website. Your best option is to right-click the download link and select Save As.
• Extract the contents of the downloaded file to a folder on the local system. You may need to change the file extension to zip if you have only access to the standard Windows unzipper.
• Move the two files NPSWF32.dll and flashplayer.xpt into the Firefox plugin directory. The plugin directory is located in the root directory if you are using a portable version of Firefox, if Firefox is installed is is located in the profile folder. Easiest option to find out where the folder is located is to enter about:support in the address bar. This works for Firefox 3.6 and up.
• If no Plugins folder exist create the folder and move the two Flash Player files into the folder.
• You can now enjoy Flash based contents. Be aware that the plugin is not auto-updating itself. You need to make sure to keep it up to date manually.

You have a few additional options that you may want to explore. If you can run portable software, you may want to consider using Google Chrome portable, since the browser ships with the Flash Player plugin natively.

The same is true for other portable browsers. Just configure the browser at home so that it includes the Flash plugin and run it from the computer where you have limited access rights.

I’m not sure if there is a way for Internet Explorer as well. If anyone has some insights let me know in the comments.

The internal Adobe Flash plugin was only the first step to improve on the traditional browser plugin model. The Chrome developers have integrated a native PDF reader plugin, which they call Chrome PDF Viewer, in the latest Chrome dev release.

Native PDF support has the same advantages that native Flash support offers.

PDF files render like HTML web pages, allowing basic interactions (zooming, searching) with the document.

The native pdf plugin is disabled by default and needs to be enabled by going to about:plugins and selecting the enable link next to the Chrome PDF Viewer entry.

chrome internal pdf

PDF files are displayed as websites from that moment on when the user left-clicks them. The Chrome developers promise to improve the rendering quality before the Chrome PDF Viewer gets integrated into the beta and stable channels of the web browser.

chrome pdf viewer

The current implementation is not supporting all advanced features of Adobe Reader. Google plans to give users a choice to launch Adobe Reader – or another pdf reader – instead if their rely on those advanced features.

The PDF functionality is using the web page rendering sandbox of Chrome to protect users from malicious documents and exploits.

Interested users can update the browser internally by clicking on the Wrench icon and then About Google Chrome or by visiting the Getting Involved page to download the latest Google Chrome dev release directly from the Chromium project server.

This is now the fourth week of the change. There have not been many situations where I missed the Flash player, mainly when some of my friends send me a link to a video that I could not watch, when a website embedded a flash video that would not play and when I tried to watch online video at sites like Hulu or Gametrailers.

One of the most irritating experiences was the constant notification in the RSS feed reader RSS Owl that the Flash Player was not installed. It was possible to turn that message off but this also meant that the reader would not display images anymore. I still decided to turn it off as the messages were to frequent to be ignored.

I did cheat just a little bit as I run a developer version of the Google Chrome web browser which, as some of you may know, comes with native Flash support. I’m still able to access Flash content when I start that web browser.

I discovered two additional workarounds. The first was to change the Youtube Flash Player to the experimental HTML5 player. I was then able to play many – but not all – Youtube videos without Flash. But only on the site directly and not on websites that embed the videos.

The second option was to download videos if I needed to watch them. This was again not possible on all sites and for all videos but it helped me out several times. It is not such a practical thing to do but still better than not watching it at all or running Flash in the background all the time.

I have decided to continue on this path. No Flash plugin on my PC with the exception of the native Flash plugin in Google Chrome. It works pretty well and the PC is more secure without Flash.

Google’s intentions are to increase the stability and security of the browser by including Flash natively. The main advantage of this approach is that the plugin can be automatically updated whenever Adobe releases a new version of their Flash player.

Internet users who have installed Adobe Flash externally need to update the software manually whenever an update is released. The Mozilla developers for instance have tried to aid users by checking for outdated plugins whenever a Firefox update is installed on a computer system.

Google’s approach on the other hand is fully automated. There is no need to install Adobe Flash anymore, except if other web browsers are used as well.

Users who do not want to use Adobe Flash in the Chrome browser can disable the plugin by typing about:plugins in the Chrome address bar. This opens a list of all browser plugins that are currently recognized by the web browser. Each plugin can be disabled by clicking on the disable link next to it.

The native Flash plugin is only available in the latest development release of the web browser. It is likely that Google will add the feature in foreseeable time to the release version of the browser as well so that all Chrome users benefit from the integration.

The Google Chrome developers have decided to include the Adobe Flash Player plugin into the latest dev version of the web browser “so that [users] don’t have to install it or worry about keeping it up-to-date”.

The Flash player plugin needs to be enabled with the startup parameters –enable-internal-flash and Google has announced plans to bring that functionality to all Google Chrome users as soon as possible.

What’s the benefit of integrating Adobe Flash into Google Chrome? The main advantage is that Flash is now integrated with the Google Chrome auto-update mechanism ensuring that the Flash plugin is always the latest version reducing security risks for users who do not update their plugins immediately when new versions are released.

But this also means that Flash is integrated in the Chrome browser and it is likely that the devs at one point will activate it automatically for all users.

This adds weight to the web browser, especially for users who prefer not to install Adobe Flash. It also means that Chrome users might be left with an insecure version of Flash for some time considering Adobe’s track record of security updates meaning auto-update is nice but not very useful if Adobe is not offering an update to a known security vulnerability immediately after it was discovered.

The latest dev version of Google Chrome includes a basic plugin manager as well that can be used to disable plugins from loading on all websites. There are still a few bugs to be sorted out:

On Windows, if you have Adobe Flash Player for Windows Firefox, Safari, or Opera installed, the Flash plug-in will still work in some cases even if you decline the license agreement (when using –enable-internal-flash) or disable the Flash plugin from about:plugins. We’re working on it.
If you disable (or enable) a plugin on about:plugins, your change does not take effect until you restart Google Chrome.
There is no bundled Adobe Flash Player plug-in for 64-bit Linux.

The latest dev version of Google Chrome can be downloaded from the Getting Involved page over at the Chromium project.

That was then, this is now. During my first trials with Ubuntu 9.04 I discovered just how far the installation of browser plugins has come. This article will illustrate to you this fact.

Ideally, of course, the distribution would ship with all of the necessary plugins installed. By default there are a number of plugins already for you:

• Demo Print
• DivX
• Quicktime
• VLC (handles many media formats)
• Windows Media Player

But the number one plugin is still missing. Why? The reason for flash missing is because there are actually three different flash plugins you can install. One is the official Adobe plugin and the other two are open source versions. Although I am a big supporter of open source software, both open source flash plugins are still in their infancy and are not yet up to par with the official version. I made the mistake of installing one of the open source versions and had to uninstall so I could get the official version.

How to install

As is typical for Linux, there are a number of ways to install the flash plugin. You can download the plugin from the Adobe site. You could open up a terminal window and issue the command:

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

You could open up Synaptic (Add/Remove Software utility) and search for adobe and select “flashplugin-installer”.

Or you could browse to a web site that requires Flash.

The latter is the easiest and reliable.

Figure 1

When you go to a site that requires flash you will see a bar appear with a button on the right side labeled “Install Missing Plugins” (see Figure 1). Click that button and a new window will open (see Figure 2). This new window asks you to choose which flash player you want to install. There are three choices:

Figure 2

• Swfdec: The GNOME version of the flash player
• Adobe Flash Player: Official version
• Gnash: GNU SWF player

Choose the Adobe version and click Next. You will then be warned that the Adobe Flash Player will download and install another application. This is okay. You will be required to enter your user password to continue.

Once the installation has finished you will need to click the Finish button.

Check the installation

After the installation is complete you can check it by opening up the plugins page. Do this by typing about:plugins in the address bar. In this page you will see all installed plugins listed. The first one listed should be the most recently installed, which will be flash.

Using this method does not require you to restart Firefox. You have completed the process of installing the Adobe Flash plugin for Firefox.

Final thoughts

If you have any history with Linux then you know how much of a relief it is to be able to install browser plugins so easily. If you have any interest in using the open source version of these plugins, give them a try. You can uninstall them by looking at the about:plugins page to know which version you have installed. When you know which plugin you have installed search for it in Synaptic and remove it. Once removed you can go through the process of installing through Firefox again.

Naturally the first thing you will need to do is to download the Firefox source. Once the source is downloaded you have a choice to make. You can install Firefox for each user on the system (if there is only one user you don’t really have much to worry about) or you can install Firefox “system wide”. If you choose to install for just one user then place the source file in the users home directory. If you want to install it “system wide” move the file to the /opt directory (you will have to have root permissions or use sudo to do this.)

Now that the file is in place it is time to unpack the file. More than likely the source package will be in bunzip2 format. To unpack the file you will issue the command bunzip2 firefox-XXX.tar.bz2. (Where XXX this the release number you downloaded.) Once bunzip2 has done its thing you will be left with a tar file firefox-XXX.tar (Again where XXX is the release number.)

When you unpack the Firefox tar file a new directory will be created called simply firefox. This new directory contains everything Firefox needs to run. All you have to do now is issue the command ~/firefox/firefox to start up the browser.

Starting Firefox

Naturally you don’t want to have to start Firefox from command line every time you want to run the browser. What you will want to do is edit the preferences in either your menu entries or the Firefox application icons on either your Panel or your desktop. When you do edit the preferences you will want to change the command entry. The entry that came with the pre-installed Firefox will most likely be:

firefox %u

You will to change that to:

~/firefox/firefox %u

Installing Flash

Once you have Firefox up and running you can install plugins manually. For instance, installing the Macromedia Flash plugin involves downloading the Flash plugin, (download the source, not the binary) unpacking the file with the command: tar xvzf install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz, change into the newly created directory with the command cd install_flash_player_10, issue the command ./flashplayer-installer, and answer the necessary questions. When you are asked where the installation directory is you will enter ~/firefox.

You’re done. Now you can fire up Firefox and enter about:plugins to make sure the flash player plugin is installed (it will also tell you which flash version you are using.)

Final Thoughts

It may not be the easiest method of installation, but it’s the best when you want to have more control over your web browser. You will also find it much easier to keep up to date with both the browser itself as well as the plugins you install.