FedEx will give you $5 to reinstall Flash

The world’s most hated plugin is clinging on thanks to a generous $5 discount offer from FedEx, which apparently desperately needs customers to reenable Adobe Flash to be able to print things from its website. If you head on over to the company’s online printing portal, you’ll be kindly instructed to reenable Flash in Chrome or Safari settings, or install it again if you’ve purged it from your machine.

“As a thank you for your patience and for being a valued FedEx Office customer, please use ‘FLA726’ at checkout to receive $5 off on orders over $30,” the offer reads.

Photo by Nick Statt / The Verge

Granted, a good number of sites still do run on Flash, especially free webgame sites and those with custom video players. For that reason, Google, Apple, and Microsoft all make it relatively easy to reenable the plugin when necessary, sometimes by clicking the webpage. In this case, however, FedEx wants you to head on over to your Chrome plug-ins page and set Flash to “Always allowed to run,” which is something you should probably not keep checked for any duration of time.

Not only is Flash content increasingly being phased out for HTML5 — the mightiest blow is widely considered to be YouTube’s dropping of Flash in 2015 — but Adobe’s standard is simply clunkier and less secure. The web is better off without it, unless you absolutely must process an online print order with FedEx, that is.