Microsoft and Flash Player Security Updates

Ed Bott:

If you use Windows 7 (or earlier) with any modern browser and you’ve enabled automatic updates, you already have the latest Flash security fixes. Ditto if you use a Mac.

But if you’re using Internet Explorer 10 on any version of Windows 8, including the RTM bits available via MSDN or TechNet and the enterprise preview, you are at risk. You cannot manually update the version of Flash baked into IE 10. Only Microsoft can do that. Microsoft made a bold design decision with Internet Explorer in Windows 8, adding Adobe’s Flash Player to the browser as a built-in component instead of a third-party plugin. That design echoes Google’s decision long ago to include Flash Player in every version of Chrome. The advantage of this design for Microsoft is that it enables playback of Flash content in the otherwise-plugin-free Windows 8 browser. The bad news is that it adds a bottleneck between Adobe’s updates and browser users.

The solution is obvious.

★ Thursday, 6 September 2012