Issue 687253  has been merged into this issue.

Furthermore, this policy setting needs to go beyond the options available in the Settings page (run all, run some, click to play) and offer a total block the user cannot override.

I am not seeing "Enable Flash policy" in policy editor in latest chrome stable: 56.0.2924.87.This may be due to flash depreciation, allowing HTML5 by default (issue : 641632).

Guessing its expected. George, could you please take a look at this issue.

I'm all in favor of deprecating Flash, but what happened first is that the chrome://plugins page, that allowed simply disabling the plugin entirely, was started on deprecation in 56, along with the DisabledPlugins policy.

When that happened, and the new Flash setting was introduced instead, nobody noticed that now there is no policy option to control it.

As long as Flash is supported in any way, there must be a way to disable it through policy. Not having that makes Chrome unsuitable for corporate environments, IMO.

Hi,

You can control Flash behavior with the DefaultPluginsSetting policy.

See https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3#DefaultPluginsSetting

You can also whitelist (PluginsAllowedForUrls) and blacklist (PluginsBlockedForUrls) URLs.

Oh, yes. Thanks! Sorry for the noise then.

I had assumed (...) this policy could not be mandatory because it has "Default" in its name.

The PDF viewer is not affected by the policy, which is surprising, but I need it, so for the moment, that's good. (The interaction between the "open PDF in external viewer" content setting and the chrome://plugins page is interesting – if the "external" option is on, the PDF viewer is "disabled by enterprise policy", probably the only plugin where that status can still appear in 56.)

Anyway, thanks again.

To add some more to the answer in #8:

The old policies PluginsEnabled and PluginsDisabled are not simply dropped they are translated into the policies specific to Flash or PDF. This means if you have specified there one of those two plugins or "*" they will be correctly preserved. Widevine will soon be covered similarly too.

For PDF the new policy is called AlwaysOpenPdfExternally and when set to True the internal PDF viewer is disabled. 

See https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3#AlwaysOpenPdfExternally

OK, now I'm confused (more than before). First, thanks for the hint about the DisabledPlugins policy. It now affects the content setting, so it still works.

Second, it might be a good idea to update the policy list to mention this; currently it still says "The plugins are marked as disabled in 'about:plugins'", which is wrong in 56. The sentence "Please use the Google Chrome to control the availability of the Flash plugin and Google Chrome to control whether the integrated PDF viewer should be used for opening PDF files." could also use some improvement.

Third, I notice that Flash click-to-play now does not work at all. With _no_ policy applied, the content setting _manually_ set to click-to-play, and no site exceptions in the list, Flash is run automatically, with no prompt. On the other hand, pages that purport to detect whether Flash is installed report it as absent.

Pages that run Flash immediately:

- https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player.html
- https://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5ZiKqRWIwg&nohtml5=1 (and YouTube in general)

Page that reports Flash as not present: http://isflashinstalled.com/

The policy description for Disabled/EnabledPlugins is already changed to reflect their deprecated nature: 

https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3#DisabledPlugins

maybe you have older policy templates definition file which doesn't have the changed strings? Even so consider moving the contents of these policies to their new counterparts as we might remove them completely in some future version of Chrome. Don't worry, it won't happen in the next one or two releases, but it will happen eventually.

I also tried the first two links in the comment above and for me it seems to work as expected. Namely the first one tell me "Flash Player is pre-installed in Google Chrome, but not enabled. You can skp the steps below. See Enable Flash Player on Google Chrome." and the second one shows the puzzle piece and asks me to allow Flash. I am running Chrome 56.0.2924.87.

Youtube is automatically reverting to HTML5 so you won't notice the absence of Flash there.

1. I referred to the "policy list", by which I meant the policy list, i.e. the page you put a link to into comment #10. Not any policy templates. Had I meant to complain about policy templates, I would have called them "policy templates".

2. I wrote that the sentence about "about:plugins" was out of date, not that the policy was not documented as deprecated. What I meant was that this sentence should be replaced with one that explains that the policy now specifically affects the content settings for Flash and PDF.

3. As far as I am aware, there _is_ no "new counterpart" to the DisabledPlugins policy as regards Flash; there is certainly none in the policy list. This is what this bug is about.

   I declared myself satisfied (in comment #9) when I learned that a) DefaultPluginsSetting is still effective against Flash and b) is not effective against the PDF viewer, because that happens to match my requirements.

4. Nice to know it works for you. Except that it apparently does _not_ work for you in the case of the first link. For you, it fails to run at all, for me, it fails to _not_ run. Mine is worse. My Chrome version is the same as yours.

5. The YouTube link was clearly meant as an example of a page where Flash does not do click-to-play but runs immediately, as it is in a list of links titled "Pages that run Flash immediately". My problem is not that Flash does not run, it is that it does.

   Why do you assume that any mention of YouTube and Flash in close proximity, no matter what it actually says, must be about YouTube not playing video because Flash does not work? I would be perfectly happy if that YouTube page fell back to HTML5, although I suspect that if Flash CTP worked, it would not fall back and show the puzzle piece instead. Yes, I am aware of chrome://flags/#prefer-html-over-flash .

Thanks for the awesome feedback! Please don't see my comment above as offensive or assuming you don't know what you are talking about. I am as interested to get you going as you are yourself :)

Addressing your points inline.

> 1. I referred to the "policy list", by which I meant the policy list, i.e. the page you put a link to into comment #10. Not any policy templates. Had I meant to complain about policy templates, I would have called them "policy templates".

Point taken :) Sorry.

> 2. I wrote that the sentence about "about:plugins" was out of date, not that the policy was not documented as deprecated. What I meant was that this sentence should be replaced with one that explains that the policy now specifically affects the content settings for Flash and PDF.

Actually now that you made me re-read this text again I see that there was an issue when generating this HTML from its source which mangled the first sentence beyond recognition and it was supposed to contain the new policies that are supposed to replace this one:  Please use the *Google Chrome* (should be DefaultPluginsSetting policy) to control the avalability of the Flash plugin and *Google Chrome* (should be AlwaysOpenPdfExternaly) to control whether the integrated PDF viewer should be used for opening PDF files.

> 3. As far as I am aware, there _is_ no "new counterpart" to the DisabledPlugins policy as regards Flash; there is certainly none in the policy list. This is what this bug is about.

   I declared myself satisfied (in comment #9) when I learned that a) DefaultPluginsSetting is still effective against Flash and b) is not effective against the PDF viewer, because that happens to match my requirements.

Glad to know this issue is resolved :)

> 4. Nice to know it works for you. Except that it apparently does _not_ work for you in the case of the first link. For you, it fails to run at all, for me, it fails to _not_ run. Mine is worse. My Chrome version is the same as yours.

The first page is not even trying to instantiate the Flash plugin if it figures out it is Chrome running and claiming no flash is available. Which kind of works as expected from the perspective of what the purpose of this page is imo. You are right though that what you see is worse and should not be the case.

> 5. The YouTube link was clearly meant as an example of a page where Flash does not do click-to-play but runs immediately, as it is in a list of links titled "Pages that run Flash immediately". My problem is not that Flash does not run, it is that it does.
>
>   Why do you assume that any mention of YouTube and Flash in close proximity, no matter what it actually says, must be about YouTube not playing video because Flash does not work? I would be perfectly happy if that YouTube page fell back to HTML5, although I suspect that if Flash CTP worked, it would not fall back and show the puzzle piece instead. Yes, I am aware of chrome://flags/#prefer-html-over-flash .

Both for 4 and 5 I am leaving to tommycli@ who I cc-ed before to say if there is any good way for you to provide information to diagnose why click-to-play is not working as expected in your setup.

Best,
Julian

More info here:
support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7084871