New topic: Flash Player 11.4

GregN

Flash Player 10
And here I thought I would be done writing about Flash Player for a while.

Today Adobe released Flash Player 11.4.402.265. If comments here are to be believed, this release fixes a bug that can occur when the auto-update process runs when nobody is logged in. It may be difficult to test until the next Flash update, however.

In last week’s post here, I outlined some of the issues with Adobe’s recommended “silent” install method for Flash Player:

  1. This “silent” install causes an icon to appear in the Dock as it runs.
  2. Executing this method as described by Adobe fails when the machine is at the loginwindow — the process hangs indefinitely.
  3. It turns out there is an “–uninstall” flag for Adobe Flash Player Install Manager, but it cannot be done silently; it always displays a confirmation dialog and a success/failure dialog.
  4. Uninstall is therefore impossible at the loginwindow, as the OS prevents display of the dialogs (not that you’d want to rely on people clicking on the dialogs anyway)

One more issue has since occurred to me: you cannot use this installation method to install Flash Player on anything other than the current startup volume. Therefore, there is no way to include Flash Player in a “compiled” image, such as one built with InstaDMG, Apple’s System Image Utility, or FileWave Lightning. It’s also not possible to use this method with a NetInstall image, or incorporate it into a package built with createOSXinstallPkg. And if you wanted to use this method with DeployStudio, you must do it as a “postponed” install; it will not work as a “live” install.

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New topic: Flash Player 11.4

5 thoughts on “New topic: Flash Player 11.4”

  1. Patrick Fergus says:

    FWIW in the earliest comment on the Adobe bug base page I outlined how to trigger a FP auto update using the current version of FP. Adobe didn’t say it wasn’t valid (they didn’t say it was right either).

    1. I tried a variation on your method and no updates occurred, either when no-one was logged in, or when someone was logged in. Yet I could click the “Check now” button and it would find an update. So maybe they “fixed” the issue by breaking background updates!

  2. Michael says:

    Just install the pkg and ignore Adobe’s recommended silent install procedure. As long as that only breaks the “Check Now” button, that seems like a reasonable tradeoff. What would you need it for anyway if you’re mass-deploying software?

    To make everything clean and complete, make sure to rm -f /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.adobe.fpsaud.plist in your postinstall script to completely disable the auto-updater.

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