Adobe Flash Player plug-in is integrated with Google Chrome and enabled by default but do you actually need it? Flash plugin is the most vulnerable and unstable plugin which hinders the browsing experience. Check the top 10 most vulnerable software list.
Flash plug-in is still in use because of some popular Flash based gaming and video websites. If you use YouTube only for watching videos and play the games made in HTML5, then you are wasting your system resources and spoiling your browsing experience.
If you press Shift+Esc in Chrome to launch the Task manager, you will see Shockwave Flash plug-in gets active whenever it detects a Flash content on the web. In the screenshot below the Flash plugin is using 15 MB of RAM for displaying a simple banner ad on Winmatrix. The memory usages increases up to 100 MB if you open 5 to 8 tabs.
How to disable Flash plug-in in Chrome?
- Type chrome:plugins in the address bar of Chrome and hit Enter.
- Click on Disable under Adobe Flash Player
- Restart the browser
Note: If you've previously installed Adobe Flash Player separately, you'll see two files listed for the plug-in. If both are listed as enabled, the version bundled with Chrome will be used. To enable or disable a specific version of Adobe Flash Player, click Details in the upper-right corner of the page. Then click the Enable or Disable link for the version of Adobe Flash Player you want to enable or disable. The file pepflashplayer.dll is the Flash Player plug-in integrated with Chrome and NPSWF32.dll or NPSWF32_*_*_*_*.dll is the system plug-in.
Switch to HTML5 version of YouTube Player
- Login to YouTube
- Go to https://www.youtube.com/html5
- Click on Join the HTML5 Trial
Please vote in the poll and comment if you have disabled the Flash plug-in or not. 