Adobe Flash Player is a program that runs in your web browser, and allows you to watch videos, hear audio, and use other interactive features across the web.

For a long time, most things on the internet ran on Flash — online games, advertisements, entire websites. Even YouTube once used Flash to play videos.

However, because of security issues that made it easy for data breaches to occur, Flash has fallen out of favor, and most websites have switched to the newer HTML5.

This will be coming to a head on December 31, 2020, when Flash will stop running entirely in every major browser — Google Chrome included.

In the meantime, though, since some legacy sites still run on Flash, you may want to know how to keep it updated in Google Chrome. Here’s how to do it on a Mac or PC.

How to update Flash Player in Google Chrome

1. Open Google Chrome on your Mac or PC.

2. In the address bar, type “chrome://components” (without the quotes) and then press Enter.

3. In the Components menu, scroll down until you find “Adobe Flash Player” — it’s probably near the bottom of the list. When you find it, click the “Check for Update” button underneath.

4. If the status underneath changes to “Component updated,” you’ve successfully updated to the latest version of Flash. If it reads “Component not updated,” it means you already have the latest version.

If the status instead reads “Update error,” you may want to try completely reinstalling Flash. For your safety, make sure to only do this from the Adobe website:

1. Go to adobe.com/go/chrome.

2. Select your computer’s operating system and version – in this case, since you’re using Chrome, the version will be the one labeled “PPAPI.”

3. Click “Download Now,” and follow the steps in the file you download to reinstall Flash.