Installing Flash Player Plugin on Firefox without having Administrator Access or Premissions

Last updated on Tue, 2010-02-02 16:43. Originally submitted by fabio on 2007-02-19 16:32.

UPDATE: The following guide, originally written for Firefox 2, has been used successfully on Firefox 3, Firefox 3.5 and Firefox 3.6. Users of Firefox Portable edition (versions 3, 3.5 and 3.6) also have been successful using this guide.

The Windows computers available at my University permits login only by autenticated users (students) who don't have Administrator access and permissions.

Installing software on those PC is then not possible.

Recently they finally installed Firefox 2 but without the Flash plugins, which is absolutly useful/needed.

I then tryed to install the Flash Player using the "standard" way (click on the missing plugin link then install the plugin..). However without administrator plugins it was not possible to install.

Then I started doing some tests trying to install the plugin manually. Now I have it installed and working perfectly!

This is how I managed to install it without administrator permissions:

1. Download the XPI archive of the Flash Player Plugin to your hard disk (right click on the download link then "Save link as.."). XPI archives are only ZIP files containing the files used by the plugins.
2. So you can safely rename the file you just downloaded, called flashplayer-win.xpi, into flashplayer-win.zip (you are changing its extension from .xpi to .zip)
3. Extract the files in the archive. You can use any program capable of opening .zip files (WinZip, WinRAR or the free and great 7-zip). There are also websites which can uncompress archives: wobzip.org.
4. Copy the files flashplayer.xpt and NPSWF32.dll to %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Plugins\
   • %APPDATA% is not a real folder. It's an alias. By inserting it in your windows explorer address bar, you'll be redirected to the real folder which holds your applications profiles and settings. The location of this folder depends on various setting that's why we need the alias and not an absolute path.
   • You can open this folder simply choosing "Start → Run → Type in %APPDATA% → OK".
   • In case you don't have a Plugins folder you can create one and place your files there.
5. Restart Firefox
6. Enjoy your flash websites!