Is Adobe Flash Player needed any more?
I think I alluded to this in a question posed earlier in 2015 but couldn't at the time decide whether it was best to keep Flash Player or not. However, news in the last couple of months about further and perhaps more serious security flaws in this plug-in has caused me to revisit the matter.
For the moment, I'm still using FP, having recently manually updated it, but I'm wondering whether my continued use of it is simply creating more and more work for myself. I thought I was once told that FP was now an outdated and vulnerable player in which websites run video clips, for instance. I seem to recall someone mentioning HTML5 as being its replacement, but exactly how one would implement that I wasn't sure, and that's still the case.
Some of the websites that I regularly visit do use FP (but possibly as an option?), eg. the UK's BBC website in respect of news and other short video clips, but I've no idea whether they'd work equally well without FP and with HTML5 activated instead. Can anyone usefully comment on the BBC website in this regard?
I must say I'm in any event annoyed by FP pop-ups that appear whenever I visit sites not on my 'usual' list, but then that's largely down to me having configured FP to ask me for permission to run in them, so I suppose I shouldn't complain.
As for getting rid of FP on my Mac, I've discovered that, apart from the FP application itself being resident on my machine, there's an 'Adobe Flash Player Install Manager' app found in the Utilities folder of Applications (reached via Finder). I've discovered that if I click on it and open it I'm presented with the beginnings of an Uninstall procedure. I'm therefore presuming that that's a genuine and reliable way (and maybe the cleanest?) of uninstalling FP and avoiding the necessity of downloading a specific uninstaller from the Adobe website. I guess the Install Manager must have been an optional additional download that I agreed to when I very first obtained FP.
Returning to the matter of HTML5, how would I envoke its use (as a visitor to websites), in Safari 9.0.1? Is it hidden away somewhere in the Develop menu? Would I need to envoke it specifically at all, ie. is it actually the default nowadays? At present I don't see anything remotely called 'HTML5' as selectable in Develop. Can FP be active on the machine as well as HTML5, or would this give rise to a clash (eg. during a period in which to test whether video clips, etc in HTML5 work equally well as in FP)? I don't think there's a way of just temporarily disabling FP, is there?
iMac (27-inch, Late 2013), OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)