Sunday, March 15, 2009

Windows Tip: Flash on Firefox and Chrome without Admin rights

We all hate it when administrators cripple your fully functional office PC by adding access controls and restrictions to it.
IE7 is the only certified browser at my workplace. It's a well known fact that the web experience on Chrome and Firefox is way better than IE but I don't have admin rights to my system and hence no 3rd party software installations are permitted.

But luckily, Chrome and Firefox portable install beautifully without admin rights.

Now the only issue is that Flash for Chrome and Firefox cannot be installed without admin privileges. Fret not, here is a smart hack to get Flash without really installing it.

1. Download this xpi file and rename it to .zip.

2. Now Extract it with Winzip or your Windows extractor.

3. Copy the flashplayer.xpt and NPSWF32.dll files from the extracted location and paste them to
C:\Users\"your user name"\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\plugins

(Similar location for Firefox)

4. Restart Chrome and check youtube.

Voila! We beat the administrator yet again. Enjoy surfing and youtube at work ;)

And here is the rest of it.

2 comments:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jason said...

An easier way to get to the correct file is to paste the following into "Run" under the start menu:
%userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application