Ubuntu – Is Google support for Chrome in 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 really ending

This answer may be outdated due to recent changes to Adobe and Flash. This answer is left here as is for historical purposes.

Firefox is dropping support for NPAPI soon, which may make this answer out dated and invalid. It may only be possible to get Flash in Chrome, and only Chrome, at some point, such that there is no Firefox solution.

Since Adobe no longer supports Flash on Linux, Chrome is one of the remaining options that ships with Flash included. This is a Chrome special case, as detailed in the Flash Roadmap from Adobe in the Linux subheading under Personal Computers.

You can use Pepper Flash (called "Fresh Player") on Firefox. Webupd8 even commented on it here and how to get it working (the linked article was posted on May 29, 2014 and may be out of date). The plugin may be usable as it seems to be suggested regularly in the Ubuntu IRC chats as a solution.

The below is extracted from the Webupd8 post:

NOTE: The wrapper used for this is in ALPHA stage and is likely to be EXTRAORIDNARILY unstable.

To summarize the steps they detail, though:

1. Install Fresh Player Plugin in Ubuntu (via PPA), by using the following commands:

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install freshplayerplugin
   

2. The easiest method to use this means that you will unfortunately need to install Google Chrome for this to work. This is becauseFresh Player Plugin is just a wrapper for libpepflashplayer.so, so it needs this file which is bundled with Google Chrome. The easiest way to get this file is to simply install Google Chrome Stable - download it from here, then install it.

   2a. Alternatively:

   There are other ways of getting libpepflashplayer.so but I won't post installation instructions for all of them here.

   Instead, I'll just list them below:

   • If you're using Google Chrome Unstable, create a symbolic link from /opt/google/chrome-unstable/PepperFlash to /opt/google/chrome/ or change add a freshwrapper.conf file and add the /opt/google/chrome-unstable/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so path there - see step 3

   • You can install Pepper Flash using 2 other ways: via the installer available in the official Ubuntu 14.04 repositories and via the Pepper Flash PPA which is also available for older Ubuntu versions - once installed, then you'll need to create a symbolic link for Pepper Flash to /opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so or see step 3 for how to change the path to it.

3. Remove the flash plugin installed by APT: Remove/Purge these packages from the Software Center flashplugin-installer adobe-flashplugin adobe-flash-properties-gtk adobe-flash-properties-kde or just run in a terminal:

   sudo aptitude --purge-unused purge flashplugin-installer adobe-flashplugin adobe-flash-properties-gtk adobe-flash-properties-kde
   

   The Pepper Flash package doesn't replace the original library file, this is why up to this step, you can see both versions of the Flash plugin in the Add-ons page, and there's no way to be sure that Firefox will use the latest version. And you just can't disable one without disabling the other (If you disable one and restart, both will be disabled).

4. Optional (only use it if you want to tweak various settings): configure Fresh Player Plugin

   Here you'll find an example Fresh *Player Plugin configuration - to use it, save this file, rename it to freshwrapper.conf and copy it under ~/.config/freshwrapper-data/

   Use this configuration file to change the path to libpepflashplayer.so or to tweak the sound buffer if you have shuttering sound. Don't use it to enable hardware acceleration yet as it doesn't work properly for now!

   The configuration options available in this file are pretty self-explanatory - you can configure the lower and higher bound for the audio buffer size, change the Xinerama screen used to acquire fullscreen window geometry (default: 0), change the path to libpepflashplayer.so along with command line arguments (like enabling hardware video decoding).

Edited 2017-02-28

It has happened some things with Flash recently:

• Previously Flash was shipped with Google Chrome, but it isn't any longer in the same way as before.
• Hence the pepperflashplugin-nonfree package is currently broken, even if it is about to be fixed (new download location).
• Chrome ships Flash bundled with Chrome, and there is nothing extra which needs to be done if you use Chrome.

adobe-flashplugin provides Flash plugins for other browsers, both Firefox and Chromium/Opera/Vivaldi.

Try this:

• Close Google Chrome.

• Remove both adobe-flashplugin and pepperflashplugin-nonfree.

  sudo apt purge adobe-flashplugin pepperflashplugin-nonfree
  

• Open Google Chrome and check if it made a difference.

My experience is that you may need to close and reopen Chrome a couple of times before Flash starts working.