How to fix Chrome playing

SWF files (prompts to

download instead)

Joe Duncko

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Jun 15, 2017 · 1 min read

For the last couple months I’ve been having issues playing SWF files
in Chrome on my Mac. Before the SWF would play when I drag and
drop them into the browser, or right click and open them with
Chrome. Instead, Chrome started prompting to download the SWF
again — very unhelpful.

After digging a ton I found the answer on Google Product Forums.

At the bottom of the forum, user Francis Maniaci suggests the
following:

Go to : chrome://flags/#prefer-html-over-flash
Select Disabled. Then click relaunch now.

According to him, this problem started in Chrome 56. This worked

for me, and didn’t involve downloading additional software to make
up for Chrome changing defaults.

EDIT: According to this reddit thread, it looks like prefer-html-

over-flash has been removed from Chrome’s flags as of version 61.
 There’s a couple threads of issues about this change on the
Chromium bug tracker, but none of them seem to offer any great
solutions beyond making an html page that has the swf you are
trying to play embedded.

Below in the comments there are some proposed solutions, but none
are up to my standards. If you come up with something, please share
it below as I’d like to get this working as well!

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WRITTEN BY

Joe Duncko
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Co-Founder, CEO @Event_Discovery, Organizer @CodeYoungstown. Let’s

create, together.

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