Managing Flash is even worse than it first appears.
Recent Safari updates now disable older versions of the Flash plugin. It wasn’t clear how “old” a version had to be to be disabled. Today I got an unwelcome surprise.
Most of our managed machines have Flash Player version 11.3.200.257 installed. I was aware that version 11.3.200.271 was available, but due to the issues here, I had not yet widely deployed it.
Today Adobe released Flash Player 11.4.402.265, and we started getting calls that Safari was blocking the Flash Plugin as out of date. Most of our users do not have admin rights, so we needed to fix it for them. I imported the Adobe Flash Player.pkg from the 11.3.200.271 installer into Munki and tested an install on one machine. Flash was no longer blocked.
So I still don’t know exactly how old the Flash Player must be before Safari blocks it, but now we have to be even more proactive in keeping Flash up to date in our organizations.
All the more reason to hope that the issues with the auto-update feature have been addressed with the 11.4 release. The release notes are silent on this issue. More testing needed, apparently!
