Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
Adobe Flash is a nearly ubiquitous tool for displaying video on the web. You must install if, of course, but often that's not enough.
How to I turn on Flash Player? When I go to the download site for Adobe the banner says that I have flash installed. Then I go to a website that I know has flash and it says "This site requires that you have flash player." I have already tried re-formatting to no help.
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Wow. Reformatting sure seems like overkill for a problem like this. Reformatting's a pretty major step, and not something I'd recommend without investigating things deeply.
I'm not sure what might be the problem in your specific case, but I can tell you this: there's at least one excruciatingly simple reason that Flash might not show up on many web sites, even though you've installed it.
In a word: JavaScript.
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What most sites don't tell you is that yes, you need Flash installed, but you also need JavaScript enabled. This might not be true for all sites, but it's certainly true for the vast majority using Flash that I visit.
In my case, I run the FireFox extension "NoScript" which disables Javascript on all sites, except for those that I explicitly allow. So each time I visit a new site that uses Flash, I get the message "You must install Flash", when in fact all I need to do is tell NoScript to enable Javascript. Doing that the page and Flash video work just fine.
In most cases, Javascript is enabled by default. But just in case, let's review how you turn on Javascript in IE7 and in FireFox.
Enabling Javascript in IE7
On the Tools menu, click Internet Options, and then click on the Security tab. This dialog should result:
Click on Custom Level.... In the resulting dialog scroll down until you see Active Scripting:
Make sure that Active Scripting is set to Enable.
Enabling Javascript in FireFox
Click on the Tools menu, and then the Options menu item. Click on the Content tab and you should see something similar to this:
Make sure that Enable Javascript is checked.
Risks?
In my opinion, Javascript is not risky, unless you're regularly visiting risky or questionable sites, so I typically recommend people go ahead and run with it enabled. However, we've even recently seen a theoretical scary vulnerability in most routers that could be exploited via some malicious Javascript, so I might consider rethinking that stand.
As I mentioned above, I recently started using NoScript, an extension for the FireFox browser which makes managing Javascript on a per-site basis a snap. Javascript is disabled on all sites except those you specifically allow. When you visit a site, you can quickly and easily add it to the allow list or return it to the block list with just a couple of clicks.
You can do roughly the same in Internet Explorer by adding sites to the "Trusted Sites" list, but the advantage of NoScript is simply ease of use. Literally a couple of clicks to add or remove a site from block list, and you're on your way.
Article C2960 - March 12, 2007 « »
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
December 18, 2011 10:47 AM
I keep downloading Flash Player but it won't recognise that I have downloaded it? I have done the Enable Scripting function, but I don't have a tickbox for Javascript?
18-Dec-2011
May 27, 2012 10:11 PM
How come when I try to install adobe flash player, a screen appears announcing that I have completed the installation. But when I try to search for adobe flash player, it doesn't exist on my laptop?
28-May-2012
June 25, 2012 2:22 PM
I found that all I had to do to get it to work was to NOT install Real Player and Real Downloader. Once I removed those plugins from Firefox by uninstalling them, Flash worked perfectly. You can't download YouTube videos in Firefox unless you re-install those programs, opt out of installing the plugins into Firefox, and just use IE if you want to download videos.
December 12, 2012 5:00 PM
I was having the same trouble with flash player until I installed adobe shockwave, didn't see the red bar "download flash player on youtube" anymore.
April 13, 2013 9:58 AM
In other posts, they mention the compatability view as a possible solution. I have IE 9 and am using Windows 7. Next to the compatability view is tracking protection. Some of the web sites would play the flash player properly, but other wouldn't. For those sites that didn't play properly, I turned tracking protection off and then it worked.