Adobe Flash Player was the primary conduit of embedding animation or media on web pages for so many years until the advent of HTML5 video. Now many popular websites including Youtube are favoring HTML5 video over Adobe Flash Player. This is not mainly because of the ease that the newer technology provides, but it is partly due to a series of vulnerabilities discovered in Adobe Flash Player in the last few years. And HTML5 video does not even require any plugins – if you are using Windows 10, then you have HTML5 ready web browser like Edge and Internet Explorer built inside it.
While Edge, the new web browser from Microsoft, allows you to use both HTML5 video and Adobe Flash Player, you may want to disable the latter for the sake of security reasons. Besides if you want to make the sites load a tad faster, then you may want to disable all the rich media or animations being loaded through the use of Adobe Flash Player.
Here is how you can disable Adobe Flash Player in the Edge browser:
- Launch the Edge browser and click on the ellipses icon near the top-right corner to open the browser menu.
- Click on Settings in the Edge browser menu.
- In the Settings menu, scroll down to the bottom and click on the View advanced settings button.
- Click on the toggle switch Use Adobe Flash Player to turn it off.
After this, you can visit https://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ and see if it has been really disabled for the Edge web browser. If the Adobe Flash Player is enabled, then you will see a small rectangle showing you the version of Adobe Flash Player installed in your web browser. But if the Adobe Flash Player is disabled, then you will see nothing in that rectangle and it will look like an element is missing in that placeholder.