Hide Adobe Flash Player is required notifications in Chrome

For the past couple of days I have received notifications about Adobe Flash Player on sites that I visited in Chromium.

The message read Adobe Flash Player is required to display some elements on this page. It displayed a button next to it to install the missing plug-in and a link to support users if they ran into installation issues.

I checked chrome://plugins first to display all installed plugins and noticed that Flash was not installed.

Chromium, unlike Chrome, does not ship with a native implementation of Pepper Flash which means that it relies on the NPAPI version of Flash if it is installed on the computer system.

The problem however was that Google flipped the NPAPI plugin support switch recently which meant that all of the plug-ins were disabled in Chromium as a consequence.

And that caused the "Adobe Flash Player is required" message on sites that I visited.

There are a couple of things that you can do about it. Google has not integrated an option in Chromium to disable the notification.

It appears on every site visit if a site tries to load Flash contents. Considering that many sites use Flash for advertisement, you may be exposed to the message a lot.

There is one temporary option that you have and a permanent one.

The temporary option re-enables NPAPI support for the time being. This should work until September 2015 when Google flips the switch for good and disables support permanently.

1. Load chrome://flags in the browser's address bar and hit enter.
2. Search for Enable NPAPI by tapping on F3 and entering the search query.
3. Flip the preference to enable so that NPAPI plugins become available again.
4. Restart the browser.

Chromium picks up the local installation of Flash and all other NPAPI plugins and the error notifications are a thing of the past.

This won't work anymore in September 2015. It is unclear if Google will remove the notification from Chromium then as it does not make sense to keep it at that point (as you cannot install these plugins anymore) or if they are kept.

Browser extensions such as FlashControl come to the rescue. The extension blocks Flash contents by default so that the notification is not triggered.

Note: Flash may be the most used plugin but other plug-ins are affected by the change in the same way. If you noticed that sites don't work properly anymore it may be because of the change.

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