ED#147 : ActiveX Filtering In Internet Explorer 9 and 10 Kills Flash Player

I recently upgraded to Internet Explorer 10 and promptly discovered something odd - Flash Player seemed to be broken. Whenever I tried to access a Flash application or video, it would tell me that an Adobe Flash Player upgrade was required. Take a look at these examples :

When you click on a YouTube video in Facebook...

...you will get a prompt to upgrade Adobe Flash Player.

The same problem happens in YouTube but since IE10 supports HTML5 natively, YouTube will automatically switch to HTML5. This may not happen with IE9.

Even Facebook's native video player is affected!

Neither will you be able to play any Flash-based games...

Heck, anything that uses Flash is essentially dead!

At first, I thought that perhaps the new Internet Explorer 10 required a newer Flash Player, so I downloaded and installed Flash Player - nothing happened.

I restarted Internet Explorer 10, and tried again - it still asked me to upgrade Flash Player!

So I rebooted the PC, and tried again - Flash Player continued to insist I needed to upgrade to a newer version.

That's when I opened up Firefox to test Flash Player, and guess what - everything worked! It was obvious at that point that Adobe Flash Player itself was not the problem. That's when I went "hunting" in Internet Explorer 10.

Believe it or not, it took me less than 3 seconds to spot the culprit - ActiveX Filtering. I saw it the second I clicked on the Tools tab. Logically, disabling ActiveX should not affect Flash media but you never know, so I disabled it and tried playing a video on Facebook. It instantly worked!

So there you have it. The culprit is the new ActiveX Filtering feature in Internet Explorer 10. It was also released for Internet Explorer 9, so you will face the same problem even if you are still using IE9. To solve the problem, just disable it by clicking on it. If the tick mark disappears, you have disabled ActiveX Filtering.

Hope that helps you some!

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