Downloader: It's Apple vs. Adobe again over Flash Player in OS X 10.6.4 update

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

It's Apple vs. Adobe again over Flash Player in OS X 10.6.4 update

Filed under: Security, Utilities, Adobe, Apple

Apple and Adobe have been duking it out very publicly over Apple's anti-Flash stance, and the latest update to Apple's OS X, 10.6.4, just added fuel to the fire. The update comes with a version of Flash that Adobe says is outdated and insecure. Apple's release notes for 10.6.4 say that it fixes " multiple issues in the Adobe Flash Player plug-in, the the most serious of which may lead to unauthorised cross-domain requests."

Adobe says the packaged version of Flash player, 10.0.45.2, is NOT the most secure, and that users are leaving themselves open to vulnerabilities if they don't upgrade to the latest version, 10.1.53.64. Flash Player 10.1 just recently came out of beta, so Apple was likely playing it safe by including a version of Flash that's known to function on Macs. The 10.1 beta was enormously buggy, in my experience, causing me to uninstall and downgrade to 10.0.

Adobe doesn't want to be held back and blamed for security holes when Mac users aren't given the latest version of its software, but Apple doesn't want to get blamed for a potentially poor user experience that isn't its fault. Time to weigh in, DLS readers. Whose side are you on?

[via ZDNET]

UPDATE: Adobe left a very informative comment on this post, explaining the timing on this situation and saying there's no bad blood between the two companies here, only an interest in the security of their mutual customers. They also said that even though it would have been impractical for Apple to update Flash in 10.6.4, Apple should have put something in its security bulletin letting users know they needed to upgrade to the latest Flash Player.

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