Stop forcing me to install McAfee on Flash player update!!!!!!!

[rasomaso]

First of the fact that Adobe doesn't have a contact e-mail is absolutelly outrageous! Secondly STOP including McAfee anti-virus with every update instalation. I don't want it. I already have my own anti-virus! It slows down my PC and ****ING SUCKS, ok? The least you could do is have a tick box with an option to NOT install it along with the update but I didn't see that with the latest update. It's just like Java constantly forcing my browser to bing search instead of google. Just stop this crap!

[inmotionhosting]

I couldn't agree with you more. Adobe not having a contact email is really surprising and is making me re-evaluate my company's purchase of Creative Cloud for teams. I was hoping in a more private way to implore Adobe to end the auto-install of McAfee. This is a big no no in my company's security setup. We are a web hosting company and already have taken care of anti-virus software on every PC. We are officially forbidding the install of Adobe Flash player on all my department's machines because of this very silly Adobe decision. It is an IT nightmare to keep having to un-install McAfee off every machine. This will be a company wide policy soon.

It seems Adobe has an interest in killing Flash. They are succeeding.

[jeromiec83223024]

@jerretfarmer:

Adobe offers distribution packages specifically for IT professionals that want to manage the deployment of Flash Player in their organization.  This is definitely a much less painful approach than letting your users install on an ad-hoc basis.

You'll need to apply for a free distribution license to gain access to those binaries:

Adobe Flash Player Distribution | Adobe

The system administration guide will provide everything you need on deploying and managing the automatic update behaviors of those installations.

Adobe Flash Player Administration Guide for Flash Player 14 | Adobe Developer Connection

[inmotionhosting]

Mr. Clark,

Thank you for your prompt reply. I will review this with both my East Coast and West Coast IT department heads. I would still implore you to make McAfee an option and not force it. I do have multiple PCs at home and as a developer I find this a very tacky approach. Obviously Adobe is one of the greatest software companies in the world and shouldn't be stooping to the level of freeware that installs various back end software against the users wishes and sometimes knowledge.

Also, I have both a personal Cloud membership and my company has a Team membership. There should be a more straightforward way to contact a support rep. My company has an amazing call center that answers calls in minutes. We are nowhere near the size of Adobe. I would expect your organization to be world class in regards to support ACCESS not just support. Which means a phone number and chat link at the top of every page and under the help menu of every application. Just a thought.

Thank you for your prompt response and your time. Have a great day.

[jeromiec83223024]

No problem.  I'm glad I could provide some useful information. 

From Adobe's perspective, the bundled offers are an important cost-recovery measure for what is an otherwise extremely expensive endeavor in continuously improving, maintaining and supporting products that we offer free of charge.  I'm simply an engineer on the ground, and the decisions about how we fund and staff the organization happen far, far above my pay-grade. 

That said, I totally understand your objections.  While you can opt-out of the bundled offer, many people click through the screens without reading and are negatively surprised by the result.  The engineering staff and volunteers here on the forums take the bulk of the heat for that, but ultimately we have little control over the approach. 

What I *can* do inside my sphere of influence, is provide you with good advice on how to efficiently handle managed deployments in IT organizations.  We recognize that enterprise organizations are often important customers, and we voluntarily incur significant additional work and expense for the express purpose of making the lives of IT administrators easier both by providing and testing specialized distribution packages and through a huge investment in product security efforts.

As you've noticed, we do not offer live support for our free products.  For Creative Cloud customers, help for paid products is available via the AdobeCare team.  If neither of those channels is adequate for your organization's needs, Adobe offers enterprise support agreements that may be more suitable.  If an enterprise support agreement is something that your organization would be interested in, either I or @AdobeCare would be more than happy to put you in touch with an Adobe sales representative to continue that conversation.

Best regards,

Jeromie Clark

[XyrcesFenol]

Dear Sir,

I today, sept 3, got a request to update Flashplayer on my computer, Windows 7 64 bit.

It downloads a file and executing that DOES NOT GIVE ME ANY OPTION TO AVOID MCAFFEE!!

I did abort the installation, and I'm very thankfull that I have choosen to be notified of updates for me to install.

This is very bad, an extra layer of not wanted antivirus software can hurt both system stability and performance.

I do hope that this is an misstake that is adressed in timely manner.

Kind regards

Erik

[jeromiec83223024]

Thanks for the feedback.  When Adobe distributes free products, our distribution team includes optional offers from select partners as part of the cost-recovery effort to offset the cost of those extremely expensive offerings.

I've highlighted the large area on the download page where the offer is disclosed and the option to opt-out is displayed.  If this is not being displayed for you for some reason, I would be more than happy to investigate and get it resolved.  It would be tremendously helpful if you could share a screenshot, the geographic region you're visiting from, and some system information (operating system, browser version, any plug-ins that might have blocked this content, etc) so that I can escalate the issue with the right group and get it resolved.

Thanks!

[XyrcesFenol]

It is not the standard install window. I got there as a result from a popup saying that there is an update to Flash player and if I wanted to install it.

The update popup downloads an "installer.exe" that when started just installes McAfee i parallell with the Flash player.

The downloaded file is called:     install_flashplayer14x32au_mssa_aaa_aih    that is to be started manually.

(Download link is: http://aihdownload.adobe.com/bin/live/install_flashplayer14x32au_mssa_aaa_aih.exe)

I do not recall any opt out information in any windows, as I always check for that.

Regards

Erik

Win7 64, Firefox, Europe

[jeromiec83223024]

Thanks for the clarification.  It sounds like you saw an update notification dialog, but the workflow you're describing is not the expected behavior. 

We've forwarded your note to the distribution team for further investigation, and will try to reproduce this scenario on our end using VPN nodes in the US and Europe.  If we can reproduce it, it should be an easy thing to get resolved.  In the meantime, if you happen to run into this on another machine, the more information (screenshots, etc) we can get, the easier it will be for us to escalate the issue and get it resolved quickly.

Best regards,

Jeromie Clark

[jeromiec83223024]

On a side note, are you running any ad blocking plug-ins in your browser?  Ghostery can cause the area of the screen that displays the opt-out dialogs to not load, for instance.

[XyrcesFenol]

No ad blocking plug-ins.

Eset Smart security is the only Firewall/Antivirus that I have installed.

(If you could tell me how to manually "trigger" the automatic update request for Flash player so that I can repeat the scenario I'm happy to provide screen shots.)

/Erik

[jeromiec83223024]

Yeah, a video capture would be really great for helping me escalate the issue.  I did install the latest copy of ESET Smart Security as a free trial, and I was able to see the UI as expected.

You should be able to uninstall Flash Player, install an old copy from the Archives, and then you should get the notification to upgrade within a few hours.

Uninstall Flash Player | Windows

Archived Flash Player versions

(For 14.0.0.145, you'd unzip the file, then run 14_0_r0_145/flashplayer14_0r0_145_win.exe)

Then you should get an update notification either on first launch, or the next time Flash Player update service checks the current version.xml on adobe.com.  I think the timing these days is that the update service will check after an hour of installation, and then every 24 hours after that.

[XyrcesFenol · Accepted solution]

I got the update request again day before yesterday, walked through it taking screen shoots, but this time it worked as supposed. I got the opt out question in the screen you also provided a screen shot of.

So now everything is fine.

What differs from last time is that the update file that is downloaded for me to execute is a new version:

install_flashplayer15x32au_mssd_aaa_aih.exe

The old was ...14x32au.... .exe

For me the problem is gone now, so thank you for looking in to it!

[jeromiec83223024]

The name of the payload is going to vary based on whether you were opted in or out of the offer (there's basically one name for every possible combination of variables), so that's expected.  I also checked it out running on a really slow VM yesterday while looking into whether or not ESET was affecting the way the page rendered (it's not), but what I noticed, because it was trying to run a full virus scan on my virtual machine at the time (so it was insanely slow), was that the Install button always shows up just after the opt-out pane is displayed.

Our mantra when talking about things like privacy and user expectations is "no surprises", and we take this stuff seriously.  We have a pretty big team that tests all of the various upgrade | downgrade | notification | silent auto-update | patch update | etc, combinations in the week running up to each new release, and we test them in both our engineering and staging environments before they go live.

I'll continue to look into this, but it's super weird.  Because of the scale of the Flash Player install base, we actually host all of this stuff on something called a Content Distribution Network, which is comprised of thousands of globally distributed servers.  We use the gold-standard provider in this industry, but there are very few things that operate at Flash Player's scale, and we put significant load on their systems.  You basically get routed to one of a few thousand nodes that's closest (or fastest) to you, and I'm wondering if there was some way in which that node would both be in a temporarily inconsistent state, and in just the right state to cause this would happen. I'm going to have to dig through a bunch of code to figure it out, but t's an interesting research project.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to look into this, and apologies again for the frustration you experienced.  For what it's worth, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer on Win8+ both package Flash Player as components in the browser, so they exist outside this process and are updated without requiring user intervention under any circumstances.