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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 I thought I was once told that FP was now an outdated and vulnerable player in which websites run video clips, for instance.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)

Posted on Nov 27, 2015 6:37 AM

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2 replies

Nov 27, 2015 8:21 AM in response to carefulowner

Depends. For example, YouTube has been converting all of their video content over to .mp4 so that the play via HTML5. But because there are millions of older computers out there that cannot run newer browsers (and therefore don't have HTML5 capability), they also continue to store Flash versions of the same videos. YouTube's site attempts to detect what OS and browser you're using, and serves up the video it believes you will be able to view. But I would suspect that maybe a few years down the road, YouTube will announce that all Flash content is going to be deleted, and if you want to use their site, upgrade.


Most Flash content has been reduced to ads, and who care's about those? I tried to see if I could do without Flash last week, but then the local news sites didn't work. A video would appear, but there would be no sound, and no controls to pause, back up, etc. I put Flash back on the drive, and everything worked the way it's supposed to.


Essentially, we're all in a long transition stage where site operators know they can't just drop Flash "today" since that would cause many potential viewers problems with their site. The push is very much in the "get rid of Flash" direction, but is isn't going to happen soon.

Nov 28, 2015 7:26 AM in response to Kurt Lang

Yep, well, you've more or less confirmed what were already my own thoughts on this.


One thing I happened to recall today were some settings for browser plug-ins in Safari. I found one particular set relating to Flash Player by clicking Safari > Preferences > Security > Internet plug-ins > Allow Plug-ins. Then clicking on 'Manage Website Settings' got me to a dialog where I was able to see the websites I commonly use, for which Flash has at some stage been asked for. You probably know the settings I mean. For each website it's listing you can allow, block, or just get a pop-up to ask you whether you want Flash to run. Unsurprisingly, I could see that the BBC website was in the list. This management facility allowed me to test the BBC site for Flash, ie. I blocked the running of Flash on the BBC site and then looked to see whether certain clips would run. However, as I suspected, certain embedded video clips wouldn't then run. So, I had to re-enable Flash for the BBC site. In the requiring of Flash, the latter site does appear to be unique amongst the couple of dozen sites or so that I regularly use, as I blocked Flash for all the other sites in my list but those particular sites still ran okay. This morning I've sent an e-mail to the BBC asking why there's no option for HTML5-based clips to be used as an alternative to Flash, in major browsers on desktop machines.


Like you say, we're in a bit of a transitional stage still, with Flash. So, for certain websites, it'll still be necessary to retain Flash on the Mac as a plug-in. Annoying, that.

Is Adobe Flash Player needed any more?

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