Flash Player Admin Guide

Adobe stopped supporting Flash Player beginning December 31, 2020 (“EOL Date”), as previously announced in July 2017. In addition, to help secure users’ systems, Adobe blocked Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021. Adobe strongly recommends all users immediately uninstall Flash Player to help protect their systems.

Please see the Adobe Flash Player EOL Enterprise Information Page for more information.

This Adobe Flash Player Administration Guide covers Adobe Flash Player 32. It describes Flash Player, how it's installed, how it works, and how you can control it to suit the needs of a specific network environment. This document is intended for IT or administrative professionals who manage the installation or use of Flash Player for multiple users in a controlled environment.

Read the guide:

Adobe Flash Player Administration Guide for Flash Player 32 (PDF)

What's in the guide

The Adobe Flash Player Administration Guide contains the following chapters:

Chapter 1 - Introduction: This chapter introduces what Flash Player is and why you need to install it. It also provides contain information and links to help you understand how to deploy Flash Player and work with SWF files.

Chapter 2 - Flash Player environment: This chapter describes the different environments in which Flash Player runs, where Flash Player files are stored on the system, the processes that Flash Player generates, and information on determining which version of the player is installed on a system.

Chapter 3 - Player installation: The licensed installers for Flash Player are available in a number of forms. This chapter includes sections on EXE installation, Active Directory installation, SMS and Adobe Catalog installation, interactive MSI installation using SMS, Windows registry keys, DMG installation for Macintosh, customizing player behavior, and other topics.

Chapter 4 - Administration: This chapter describes a number of ways you can create and place files on the end user's machine to manage features related to security, privacy, use of disk space, and so on. This chapter includes sections on privacy and security settings (mms.cfg) and the global FlashPlayerTrust directory.

Chapter 5 - User-configured settings: This chapter provides information on options that end users can set for managing privacy and security settings when running Flash Player on their computers. This chapter includes sections on accessing user settings, privacy options, local storage options, update options, security options, and the user FlashPlayerTrust directory.

Chapter 6 - Security considerations: Because it is critical to maintain the security and integrity of your users' computers when installing Flash Player, this chapter provides an overview of security, focusing on those aspects of particular interest to administrators deploying Flash Player. Adobe has developed a number of web pages, white papers, chapters in other books, and TechNotes that address these security issues, as well as others, in more detail. This chapter includes a security overview and discusses security sandboxes for local content, compatibility with previous Flash Player security models, and data loading through different domains. It concludes with a list of additional security resources.