Adobe Flash Updates (Annoying)

[EduardoBPrado]

Hi folks. First of all let me introduce myself as I just created the acc. I an information security researcher from Brazil, 34 years and have used Adobe products for seveal years and they are great. Very sad to see that both Microsoft and Adobe will "kill" Flash Player. I hope at least the popular sites starts converting their Flash videos to HTML5 format *before* our dear Flash Player plugin/ActiveX gets "killed" forever, else we will have a hard time watching them. (Workarounds exist of course but nowadays we lack time and would just like to visit the page and watch the videos as we are used to doing..anyways...)

So here´s what has been happening lately :

On my Windows 7 X64 SP1, fully patched, with web browsers: MS IE, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, all in their latest versions and fully up to date as of the time of this writing, I have been experiencing annoying Flash update dialogs:

They show up the usual message : "A new Flash update is available". Each web browser has to update the Flash extension (ActiveX for IE and plugins for other browsers). So, I install all the updates, then re-start the browsers and check for the Flash version and it matches the latest one.

Ok, so far so good, the annoying thing is that, then all of a sudden when I re-start the OS I get the same "Update dialog" again and I think a new update is available, and proceed to download...Upon vieweing the file in disk, it´s exactly the same one I have previously downloaded and apparently successfully installed (I always double check to make sure it´s the latest version of Flash I have), if you use Chrome, you see the same file with the sufix (1), (2) etc... MS IE and Firefox display a prompt before downloading files to disk and when you try to save, bingo! Same file!! so it asks you to overwrite....So just to make 100% sure the file was not a minor update to a previous update that got the same file name, I check the file properties. And everything matches, file date, size, digital signature and the signing date, file version etc.

Besides that, every time I proceed to install Flash, it will direct me to a page to download the installer and an annoying offer to either install Google Chrome (inside MS IE) which as I said I already have on my system, and when I do it on Chrome/Firefox, it marks the option to download and install a 3rd party protection software (currently MCaffee), which I always must be aware not to let it install those stuff on my devices (they dont actually protect in my hones opinion but leave the OS slower and some of them may send our private files without our consent, so honestly I want DISTANCE!!) ...Ok, and then after downloading and running the update setup program it always gives me the 3 options, marking the "Allow Flash to install updates automatically" .

What I wanted to discuss is :

Couldnt the Flash Player update program "remember" our choices like installing or not a 3rd party software and how we want updates to be installed (I always have to check the same options over and over again on every OS I have and this ends up being a pain)... This can be done simply by creating a settings file on eg. The folder common to all users (on Windows its c:\programdata by default) or could be done for each user by creating this file on the user´s folder, eg. in %appdata% (on Windows)

Also, check the versions of Flash plugin and ActiveX and make sure an update is really needed not to cause the same update to be installed over multiple times, and cause the end user to waste time downloading, installing, setting options etc etc, unnecessarily.

Thank you guys!!

[jeromiec83223024]

Thanks for your valuable feedback.

[EduardoBPrado · Accepted solution]

Hi, I appreciate that you took your time to read and found it useful. Hope the development team also reads it and hopefully do this "remember my settings" thingie. Easy and will be awesome for everyone!!

Cheers!

PS: I am marknig my last reply as 'correct answer' so that when the dev. team have a look, they know exactly what could be done in a more simple way as my first post was long.