Why doesn’t my Flash content work?

Flash was a software that allowed various kinds of media to play on the web. As of early 2021, browsers stopped supporting Flash and displaying the content it enabled. 

To run, Flash requited separate steps in both the browser and the website to work together; this means that there were multiple places where content needs to be activated, and in multiple ways. Most modern browsers required you to enable Flash, either through a prompt, or by downloading a plugin; how this works is specific to each computer and browser setup. Websites could also include various kinds of Flash files that must be captured in order for the archived site to fully replay. Both the necessary files as well as a browser’s settings can impact how archived pages with Flash content replay. This means that even if the relevant Flash contents are captured, there may be browser-specific replay issues.

In some cases, checking the crawl report to verify if Flash files were captured can be straightforward; typically these are .swf files. However Flash files can also call out to other formats, which can be complex to identify and understand what was/was not captured. 

The fact that Flash is no longer supported impacts how contents are viewed when archived. Because of this, combined with the fact that Flash can be a very specific issue, please contact Archive-It's Web Archivists with questions, and include as much detail as possible. Support will be limited both because of the specificity of Flash, and that it has being aged out.