Flash and limitations

[newscribe]

Hi,

I was asked by a friend the other day as to wether or not you really need to run Flash player on a mid 2010 MacBook, I said that depending on what her surfing habits were IE watching Ytube vid`s, + iPlayer etc, that I thought it was not a necessity. But a personal choice.

I suspect that she has been reading the reports of late about the FP malware, and I could not reassure her that all was fine with her system. As she upgraded from SL to Lion and got both the Mac OS X update 10.7.2 and the Lion recovery update 1.0. And said she has had no popups regarding Flash.

But I would greatly appreciate some input from forum members and your thoughts as to just what sort of limitations she would encounter without Flash player. I believe her only browser is Safari 5.1.1.

Thank you in advance for any info.

 

[chas_m]

On a desktop or notebook Mac there are no limitations on the Flash Player. While I share her view that the program is a security nightmare, Adobe has been fairly quick about fixing security issues as they come up, so simply staying up-to-date with the software should keep the sensible user reasonably safe.

To make her use of Flash safer still, a flash ad-blocker or even ClickToFlash might be the best solution for her. This blocks ALL Flash but it can be reactivated on a case-by-case basis. For video sites like YouTube the site will automatically "fall back" to HTML5 so this should not be much of an issue in normal use, and sites that rely heavily on Flash that she wants to visit can be "whitelisted" so that they work normally.

At this point in time, I recommend to users that you continue to keep Flash around for its utility purposes, but augment it with an ad-blocker (or ClickToFlash if necessary) and keep the Flash Player up-to-date.

Speaking of that last bit of advice, there is some Mac-specific malware going around that tries to pretend it IS a Flash updater/installer, so I'd suggest that you DO NOT update your Flash Player unless you have gone on your own to Adobe's Flash website and upgrade from there ONLY.

 

[newscribe]

Hi chas_m,

Thanks for your input, and yes it was her reading about this fake flash installer that prompted her worries and question. She also visited this info page and was disheartened about flash re Lion.
Known Issues | Adobe products on Mac OS 10.7 Lion

I will point her to this thread so she can read input first hand. As I said personally I feel that here system is fine.