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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss Apple’s announcements, Amazon’s Ring problems, and more.
Daniel in Prattville, Alabama asked: “I have a 2011 HP laptop. I turned it on a couple months ago and the Flash player is no longer supported and some of the things it does don’t work anymore. What can I replace Flash Player with on a 2011 HP laptop?”
Daniel, unfortunately, the answer is nothing.
Flash player was a nest of vulnerabilities and bad performance that was eventually replaced by HTML5, so if you can upgrade to a newish browser, the functionality on the modern web that used to rely on Flash will have been replaced by native HTML5 functionality.
Having said that, if youre relying on custom components that you run locally and that use Flash behind the scenes, then your only real option is to run an old, risky version of Flash. If you do that, itd be safer to run it in a virtual machine or otherwise sandbox it to be somewhat better protected again known vulnerabilities.
If all you need to load as SWF files, then you may be able to use an open source flash player, but that will only let you load local SWF files rather than anything embedded into a website or platform.
If you just want to interact with modern websites, you wont really find much of any Flash left, there was a very long notice period that websites used to upgrade to HTML5 native players before support was fully dropped by Adobe in 2020.
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