It’s been more than 20 years since the original release of Adobe Flash Player. This piece of technology used to be a de-facto standard for viewing multimedia, online video and audio streaming and rich Internet applications, but its days are now numbered. Flash was ridden with security problems right from the very start, and despite Adobe’s affords, it has never reached the point where it would be trusted by the majority of users and developers.
Most modern websites have switched from Flash to HTML5 and related technologies like JavaScript and CSS 3. For example, YouTube uses HTML5 player as a default since January 2015. This switched was largely accelerated by Adobe’s decision not to provide further support for Flash Player on Linux and Apple’s refusal to allow Flash to run on iOS devices.
Is My Adobe Flash Player Up-to-Date?
The unfortunate reality is that many people still have to rely on Adobe Flash Player for their day-to-day operation. In past, Flash was used to provide interactivity for many corporate applications and sites. Many of them still have to be updated, and, until that happens, we are stuck with what we have. If you are in this situation, the most important thing to do is to check if your Adobe Flash Player is up-to-date. This is what you should do:
- Go to Adobe’s official page for Adobe Flash Player.
- Look for a small box titled “Version Information”.
- The box will display something like this: You have version 20,0,0,267 installed
- Now, look down and compare this number with the latest available version for your particular operating system and browser.
- If they match, you have the latest version. Congratulations.
What if You Aren’t Running the Latest Version?
There are two things you can do:
- Update the Adobe Flash Player to the latest version.
- Disable the Adobe Flash Player in your web browser.
If you absolutely need to use the Flash Player, you will have to perform the update and make sure to always keep it up-to-date. However, if you can live without it, it might be a good idea to disable it completely. That way, you will never have to worry about it ever again, and all websites will sooner or later switch to HTML5 anyway. You can find instruction on how to do this by simply searching for “how to disable flash on [name of your browser]”.
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