Firefox vs. FlashPlayer

I heard from lots of you last week, and many of you had the same question. Politely stated, “What in the name of Oprah is going on with Firefox?!?”

 

On July 13, Firefox users were presented with messages stating that the Adobe plug-in was unsafe and/or asking users if they wanted to activate it. This was all because two new, serious vulnerabilities in FlashPlayer became common knowledge and were being exploited. Mozilla felt the risk to users was too great to continue to allow the player to run without advising people --- EVERY SINGLE TIME!!! --- of the risk.

Mozilla stated that the block would remain in place until Adobe fixed those issues, and on July 14 a new version of FlashPlayer was available. Installing this version caused Firefox to stop the nervous twitching and allowed users to return to a more normal usage pattern.

If you are still seeing those warnings, update your FlashPlayer…again. Open Firefox, read this explanation: https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2015/07/resolution-for-recent-flash-player-vulnerabilities.html. Then you can follow the link in that article to download and install the new version. As always, proceed carefully and decline all offers of anything except the FlashPlayer (unless of course you actually want a new version of Mcafee Security Scan, Google Toolbar, or Google Chrome).
 

If it seems that you just did an update, you’re likely correct. July 14 was the second update within a week. Which brings us to the next part of the discussion: What IS FlashPlayer and do we actually need it?

Adobe FlashPlayer is software that allows certain website content to play. A whole lot of content was written for FlashPlayer including YouTube videos, some games and other web content. There are problems though. It’s buggy and crashes a lot. It can be exploited by bad guys and requires frequent updates.

For a long time FlashPlayer was necessary to do lots of things on the web, but lately it’s being replaced by other enabling technologies. You don’t need it for most YouTube videos anymore. A growing number of people want to see it abandoned completely.

 

You can uninstall it if you want to. You might find that you really don’t need it. If you want YouTube, you can enable the HTML5 Video Player instead. (Instructions here: https://www.youtube.com/html5). You can cause Firefox to display a box instead of Flash content, and click on the Play button when you want to play Flash content. (Instructions here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/set-adobe-flash-click-play-firefox). You can also do that in Google Chrome. (Instructions here: http://www.howtogeek.com/126284/how-to-enable-click-to-play-plugins-in-google-chrome/). How do you know if that worked? Test your FlashPlayer here: https://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/.

 

Lots of people want to put an end to Flash, and it’s clearly on the way out. You can stop using it completely or start using it selectively, as described above. You can notify the makers of websites that require it that you’re unhappy about that. There are more suggestions on the OccupyFlash website: http://occupyflash.org/. Ironically, you need to allow FlashPlayer to run in order to let the site test for FlashPlayer.

What’s your take? Are you still using FlashPlayer? If you are, please, please, please keep it up to date.

 

Do you need help with your computer? I'm here to help you and your home or business computer get along!

Cate Eales runs Computer Care Kelowna (http://computercarekelowna.com/) a mobile service helping home users and businesses get along with their computers. To arrange an appointment phone her at 250-764-7043. Cate also welcomes your comments and suggestions. Send email to [email protected].

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