How To Disable Flash in Chrome [2020]

This article will show you how to disable Flash in Chrome in 2020. Flash is the most well known of all Chrome plugins – its full name is Shockwave Flash.

However, in recent years, Flash Player usage has been in terminal decline – only 3.5% of websites still use it.

Google have promised to remove Flash from Chrome completely in December 2020 (Chrome 87).

If you want to disable Flash because it keeps crashing in Chrome, see my 7 step guide to fix crashes instead. But, to just disable it for now, read on.

Updated September 2019 – since July 2019 (Chrome 76) Flash is now disabled by default in Chrome, for all sites. So if you update Chrome to 76 or higher, you no longer need to do the steps below to disable it yourself!

How To Disable Flash on All Websites

You used to be able to easily configure plugins like Flash via the chrome://plugins page but that page was removed from Chrome in 2017 and Flash was moved to Content Settings.

The idea was to help the average user find it – because they may not have known that Flash was actually a plugin…

In 2020 the Flash plugin already requires your manual intervention to run – it is set to ‘Ask first’ i.e. Flash content on websites will not just play automatically, you have to actively choose to allow it.

However, you can still disable Flash content across all websites, if you are sure you never want to be asked to allow it to run:

  • Type chrome://settings/content/flash into the address bar and press Enter to visit the Flash settings page
  • If Flash is set to ‘Ask first (recommended)’ with a blue button, that was (prior to July 2019) the default choice – click on that text (or the blue button) to change it to ‘Block sites from running Flash’ and the button changes to grey, as shown below:
Disable Flash in Chrome
  • Flash is now disabled on all websites

Note: in July 2019 (Chrome 76) Google changed this default choice to ‘Block sites from running Flash (recommended)’ so Flash is now disabled by default for all sites. If you update Chrome to 76 or higher, you no longer need to disable it yourself.