Had trouble viewing content in Chrome after the version 42 release?

As a developer I don’t always use chrome’s PepperFlash player. Today (16/04/2015) I came in to find that an application that was left in a perfectly working state simply wouldn’t load. It displayed the ‘To view this page ensure that Adobe Flash Player version x.x.x or greater is installed.’ message. Puzzled I checked the Chrome plugins only to find that my version of flash player had vanished and all that remained was PepperFlash which was disabled. As a quick fix I just re-enabled PepperFlash and voila the application loaded. There have been reports of similar plugin issues with Java, Silverlight, Unity, and other big name plugins.

The Quick Fix

This is not a long term solution however if you are someone who relies on flash player and other plugins to be working this could prove very helpful.

Open up chrome and go to chrome://chrome and perform any updates to make sure we are not fixing something that will be overwritten in a minute or two;
Navigate to chrome://plugins and inspect the disabled plugins. The one I was looking for was ‘Adobe Flash Player’. Hit enable on all of the plugins that you want;
Restart your chrome and test, you can test your flash installation by checking the video at the top of this page: https://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/

Hopefully this fixes any issues in the short term.