Windows 8.1 not recognizing Adobe Flash Player and Adobe help not helpful

Question

I have a new laptop with Windows 8.1 64 bit. I tried to view a video and it said I did not have flash player. I went to download adobe flash player and your website said I had it intergrated into 8.1 and that it was either disabled, not the right version or that active X filters needed to be clear. I followed all instructions. Flash was installed with the 8.1 64 bit version. Flash was enabled for all websites and I cleared the active X filter and I still get told that I don't have install flash because it is intergrated and but it does not work. Please help I am in a cycle where Adobe is not helping just sending me in a circle. Thank you

Answer 1

Your problems aren't with Adobe or Flash Player. They're with Internet explorer 11 and Microsoft.
IE11 (Windows 7, 8 & 8.1) has been an abomination since its release October 18, 2013. Yahoo, Facebook, BBC, ESPN and dozens of other sites and domains have had trouble recognizing the Browser. If the site doesn't recognize the browser, it won't recognize any plugins in the browser, including Flash Player. Microsoft was made aware of the problems by millions of users within hours of the release, and so far they've shown no sign that they intend to fix it anytime soon. Their recommendation is to enable Compatibility View for affected pages. Two problems with that are that it's had only limited success, and you must enable it manually for each affected page. Basically, they're telling you to "pretend" you're not using IE11.
I'm not big on "pretending", and I recommend actually using something different. Something that works where IE11 won't.
Firefox (from Mozilla)
Chrome (from Google)
Safari (from Apple)
Opera (from Opera)
ANY of those will work where IE isn't recognized, and they use the Flash Player Plug-in (for other browsers), except for Chrome, which has its own plugin embedded in by Google.