How to install Flash Player BETA ActiveX on Windows 8.1?

Report · Jul 29, 2016

Dear Adobe team,

Recently I have found out about the major change in new FP 23 (local files cannot be accessed).

Our Windows application YoWindow Weather is built around Flash ActiveX.

My PC runs Windows 8.1

I've downloaded FP 23 BETA ActiveX for Internet Explorer.

But I was not able to install it on Windows 8.1

The installer just says "Your Internet Explorer includes the latest version of Adobe Flash Player".

As a developer I need to make sure FP 23 will not break our application.

How can install Flash Player 23 BETA ActiveX on Windows 8.1?

Is it even possible?

Report · Aug 01, 2016

On Windows 8.1 and higher, Microsoft technically retired ActiveX plug-ins. There's no way to install plug-ins. On those platforms, Flash Player is actually a built-in component of IE and Edge, not a separate product, and it has to be bundled and distributed directly by Microsoft.

While we've discussed the possibility of shipping beta builds with the IE team for Win8 and higher, there are no immediate plans to do so. If you want to use the betas on Win8+, you're basically limited to the NPAPI plugin (i.e. Firefox), or you can try the Chrome Dev and Canary channels, which have a slightly different beta schedule than ours (there's a lot of complexity when you don't own your complete release pipeline), but those builds usually include some pre-release Flash Player version.

Report · Aug 02, 2016

Thank you for the informative and honest answer!

Unfortunately that means I have no way to verify if the changes in FP 23 will break our app and harm our users after the new version of Flash Player released.

This is from the notes of FP 23 beta.

"Vast majority of Flash Player users and content will be unaffected by this change. This change only impacts Flash content played from the local filesystem, using the browser. "

And that is exactly Windows applications running ActiveX component.

YoWindow is just one of them.

The last time FP release made our app broken I remember a couple of very big projects dependent on FP ActiveX affected.

The guys working on Flash Player are making a big change.

They need to be aware that the release may harm a lot of people.

If there is a problem we the developers and our users will find out about this right on the date of the release.