Is there a way to have Flash work in both Firefox and IE at the same time?

This works for me:

Download Flash installer

Close IE and Firefox

Run Flash installer

Nope, that didn’t work. I was hopeful for a second there…

What version of IE are you using?

IE8. And the latest Firefox.

You almost lost me at. “Is there a way to have Flash work?” because the answer to that is “Not really.”.

Personally, I installed it from Firefox and it works fine with Firefox and my extremely rare dabblings with Internet Exploder, though it seems to take issue with Webkit browsers like Chrome and Safari (not that I can get Safari to stop crashing long enough to even fully load…).

@jerv Yeah, no kidding. If I had a dollar for every time I installed and uninstalled Flash Player over a lifetime… ah, the possibilities.

I suspect I’m finally going to just switch to Firefox, because I can’t deal with the crazy CPU usage from hangups in IE. I just wish Firefox weren’t so damned ugly.

Something else is wrong, most likely with the OS and Flash. One install should take care of all the browsers on your machine. Really hard to tell what got crossed up so that only the running browser gets access.

Just as a stab in the dark, have you tried restarting before and after the install? Just to make sure everything is “available” and there’s no conflict with something running?

Chrome comes with Flash baked in, it’s another option if you don’t like the “feel” of Firefox.

@funkdaddy Yes, I tried restarting, but no luck. Chrome… meh, Google already has too much control over my life.

Sorry, I keep getting distracted by something shiny. I do appreciate the suggestions.

Is everyone installing Flash from the Adobe website? I find it that it’s easier to install Flash from IE because unlike with Firefox you don’t have to download it first. Just go to the Adobe website, install flash, and on IE it’ll ask you if you want to “Run” the installation.

That being said, I have a four year old laptop running Vista and I run Flash without hiccup on IE, Firefox, and Chrome (it’s pretty easy to get Flash to work on Chrome, too). I’m genuinely curious about how everyone else tries to install it.

@MarcoDemarco I’m not having any trouble installing Flash. I can install it with IE and with Firefox. It’s just that once it is installed, it only works in whichever browser I initiated the installation in. When I try to use it in the other browser, I’m told I can only (do whatever) if I go install the latest version of Flash. Which I already have.

Hmm I believe you have to install Flash for both IE and Firefox. Once you do that it should work. I get the feeling you did this already, though, so I’m not sure why it’s not working for you. What version of Windows are you on?

7.

Hmm that’s weird, dude. Did you fix this issue or are you still suffering?

LOL. I’m not sure it could be qualified as “suffering” – I’ve given up IE for a while and am working exclusively in Firefox. I don’t know… a lot of people seem to have this issue (as you’ll see if you google it), but there doesn’t seem to be an obvious solution. What perplexes me is that it doesn’t seem to happen to everyone, which it should if we have the same OS, I would have thought.