Outdated Adobe Flash Plugins Disabled in Safari Automatically Due to Security Issue
Mac Safari users who have the Adobe Flash plugin installed are likely to find it disabled automatically by Apple, due to a recent security issue with the Flash plugin. That basically means if you don’t have the very newest Flash version installed already, and most people don’t yet, you’ll see the a “Flash Out Of Date” message pop up in Safari, and any Adobe Flash content won’t load.
If you use the Safari browser with the Flash plugin and want to resolve this issue, you’ll need to get the latest version of Flash directly from Adobe and install it manually. Alternatively, users can choose to keep the plugin disabled in Safari and then use a browser like Chrome which sandboxes the Flash plugin and automatically updates it when available. While Safari can disable old versions of Flash, Safari does not automatically update the plugin.
The change was noticed initially by MacRumors, with a note from Adobe about which versions of the Flash plugin were automatically disabled by Apple:
“APPLE-SA-2014-07-10-1 OS X: Flash Player plug-in blocked
Due to security issues in older versions, Apple has updated the web plug-in blocking mechanism to disable all versions prior to Flash Player 14.0.0.145 and 13.0.0.231.”
Flash is frequently used for web based video, music clients, interactive websites, banner advertising, animations, and a variety of other interactive web features. It also happens to be a common source of headaches for some Mac users, occasionally causing browser crashes, excessive resource usage, and potential security issues, which is what Apple is looking to address by disabling all but the most recent versions. A variety of solutions are available to remedy these issues, including not using the plugin, only allowing specific sites only to use Flash, using a browser like Chrome, or, for users who don’t use the plugin at all, just keeping it uninstalled to help protect against potential risks.
Luckily I don’t have ANY Adobe software on my mac. What really bugs me are sites like BBC News on my iMac it needs flash, but works fine and looks exactly the same on my iPad. Why do flash and HTML 5, just dump flash once and for all and get on with it.
Adobe seem to be updating and pluging hole in flash on a near daily basis.
Agree 100%. If you enable the developer menu in Safari you can choose which browser to emulate. Choose iPad and most flash websites switch over to html5.
I only use and allow Flash in Chrome because of sandboxing. Frankly, with the crud the Adobe installer tries to push on us, I don’t trust the Adobe installer at all. It wants to install demos of this and that, auto updaters, and a bunch of junk – no thanks!
Ditto on that. Same goes for Adobes Acrobat reader. Apart from their creative suite of apps, Adobe pump out really outdated and seriuosly bad software. Flash needs to be killed off asap.