Chrome/Mozilla disabled Flash in Firefox starting January 2021, as the platform reached its end of life. There are still quite a lot of web pages that I came across during my consulting job that still relies on flash to function such as the vCD, vCenter, etc.
Ruffle is a community-driven project that aims to put flash back on the web.
Prerequisites to Enable Flash
- An old Mozilla Firefox version that was released prior to flash reaching EOL . This can be downloaded from http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/78.6.1esr/win64/en-US/
- Download Ruffle, a flash emulator from https://ruffle.rs/#releases
- Shockwave Player such as the one found in https://filehippo.com/download_shockwave/
- Few Custom enteries to flash configuration file
Open the browser to Ruffle
Choose your browser type and click Save Link As
Download it to your desktop folder
Lauch mozilla firefox and type about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox
Add the extension in
Launch the flash version of UI
Once the Shockwave player is installed you will get a Syswow 64 folder.
Create or edit the following file: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\mms.cfg with the following settings
EOLUninstallDisable=1
SilentAutoUpdateEnable=0
EnableAllowList=1
AutoUpdateDisable=1
ErrorReportingEnable=1
AllowListUrlPattern=https://fqdn-of-the-vcenter:portnumber
As of this moment, Ruffle doesn’t vCenter but this could change in near future so definitely keep Ruffle on your list.
I have verified connectivity to vCD 9.X, Horizon View, and few Citrix Applications.
Another method is here
I have verified connectivity to vCenter 6.X using this method so this should work across all solutions.
You will need to first download this flash player archive from this link
https://archive.org/details/flashplayerarchive
Next step you will need mozilla firefox version shown below
Install both of them and reboot the server. Once the VM is back online, launch the firefox browser and log in to the HTML UI ie: https://vc65.ash.local/UI. Parallel to that, open the https://vc65.ash.local/vsphere-client? as well in the new tab.
It will just spin for few minutes without loading anything which is okay.
After 2-3 mins, you can now see the flash version is loading and working as usual.
