Well, this was interesting to happen this week.
While at the $ayjob.. launched up a tab to get access to our vSphere environment, hit my hotkey for my password manager, and logged in only to have a fresh error I haven’t seen in years show up!
Shockwave Flash has crashed
#whee
We checked our current installed versions of Chrome. We checked out the same in our virtual Windows systems and all were failing. Chrome/Firefox – both broken.
Talking with my coworker as we went off to the Internet to figure out what is going on and found a Twitter post from William Lam:
I thought it was just me, but apparently other folks reporting Flash crashing immediately w/Flash Web Client on latest Chrome. Anyone else? pic.twitter.com/8RWbyPGLG4
— William Lam (@lamw) October 15, 2017
From there we went off to his blog, figured out what we needed to do, hit up an older system that hadn’t had Chrome updates applied yet. This allowed us to bypass any of the other hacks or beta installs. i.e.; neither of us wanted to do a full Flash install on our systems.
The steps are easy though you are trusting me that I am not a hax0r or that I am not installing a latent back-door into your system. YMMV, caveats given, no warranty nor promise of fame or riches. This does not need any escalated privileges.
Quite Chrome
Fire up a command line window of some type – Terminal.app or iTerm – whatever you fancy
cd "~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/PepperFlash" mv 27.0.0.170 27.0.0.170.old curl -L https://www.dropbox.com/s/q6wnaa5i2nqsnlb/27.0.0.159.tar -o27.0.0.159.tar tar xfp 27.0.0.159.tar mv 27.0.0.159 27.0.0.170
You’re now all set – launch Chrome!
Bug in Chrome? Bug in vCenter? Hackery works but I’m guessing when next release of Chrome drops it will stop the changes.