I get a blank screen when my screensaver runs?
If you are seeing a blank (usually white or black) screen when previewing or running a screensaver on Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows, the most common cause is that the Adobe Flash Player plug-in is not installed or needs to be updated to a newer version.
Many screensavers rely on Adobe Flash technology for light-weight graphics and animations. Before such animations can be displayed on your screen, however, a "plug-in" computer program needs to be installed. Without it, any screensaver that consists of Flash animations will instead show a blank screen and no helpful warning or error messages.
If you are using Mac OS X
For the playback of screensavers (and other programs) using Flash technology, the OS X operating system relies on the NPAPI Flash plug-in for the Safari web browser.
This is important because some web browsers, such as Google Chrome, have a Flash plug-in included in them so that you do not need to install any other software to allow playback of Flash animations within the web browser. However, these built-in plug-ins are not available to the screensavers you install, so a download of the Flash Player for Safari is required.
To download Flash for Safari, open the Safari web browser via your Launchpad, visit https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/, and follow the instructions.
Using a browser other than Safari, you can also visit https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/ and select "Mac OS X" as your operating system and "NPAPI" as your Flash version to manually download and install the plug-in.
If you are using Microsoft Windows
Users of the Windows operating system need a so-called ActiveX plug-in for Flash to allow playback of Flash animations. On Windows 8 and 10, this plug-in is automatically downloaded, installed and kept up-to-date via Windows Update.
If you have a version of Windows older than 8, such as 7, Vista or XP, use the Internet Explorer browser (accessible via the Start menu if this is not your default web browser) to visit https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and follow the instructions.
Warning: pay attention to any checkboxes on that webpage attempting to bundle the installation of the Flash plug-in with third-party software; these are not required!
Alternatively, visit https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/ to manually select and download your ActiveX or NPAPI version of the Flash player.
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