Man, Adobe Flash is annoying

[BeeBoop]

Flash has a lot of hacks that allows hackers to take control of your PC. Firefox has dropped it all together.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/14/technology/flash-firefox-facebook/

 

[MongGrel]

Flash has a lot of hacks that allows hackers to take control of your PC. Firefox has dropped it all together.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/14/technology/flash-firefox-facebook/

:thumbsup::thumbsup:

I use no script all the time anyways, but some things are just annoying.

 

[ImpulsE69]

I'm surprised facebook doesn't want flash so they can just go right to the source for all their data mining w/o having to rely on people giving it to them.

From the Article:
The good news for Firefox users is that most won't notice a change. Just under 11% of websites use Flash, according to W3Techs, a technology survey company.

Someone had to have pulled that number out their ass, or I must visit every one of those 11%.

 

[Jeff7]

If you are using Windows, you might want to look into Unchecky, it helps prevent shovelware from getting installed. http://unchecky.com/

-KeithP

So, how long will it be before the author of the software gets either a cease&desist, or else a simple monetary offer they can't or won't refuse?
Adblocking extensions or addons have whitelists, courtesy of nice arrangements with advertising companies. Everyone has their price, and it's often not very high.
(Even if a friendly C&D is baseless, it's usually enough to dissuade most people who don't have a few dozen grand sitting around that they can blow on a legal battle against a huge company, even if they'd win.)

Flash has a lot of hacks that allows hackers to take control of your PC. Firefox has dropped it all together.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/14/technology/flash-firefox-facebook/

Just under 11% of websites use Flash, according to W3Techs, a technology survey company.

I'm surprised facebook doesn't want flash so they can just go right to the source for all their data mining w/o having to rely on people giving it to them.

From the Article:
The good news for Firefox users is that most won't notice a change. Just under 11% of websites use Flash, according to W3Techs, a technology survey company.

Someone had to have pulled that number out their ass, or I must visit every one of those 11%.

I was wondering that too.

And what about Youtube? I see mention about HTML5 being used there, but I get the "Flash is blocked" thing when using Youtube on my PC, on my tablet, it shows up on any computer at work that has access to Youtube, and a few relatives have asked me what to do about that warning.

Amazon Prime's streaming service also uses Flash.

 

[Craig234]

Now, every time I boot there's an Adobe popup pushing a new product.

 

[Muse]

yeah. adobe is like real player and needs to die.

i no longer use reader. Firefox does a fine job opening PDFs

I use Foxit Reader for PDFs.

 

[Muse]

LOL, yea, I keep asking myself how this needs to be updated 5-6 times a month and as usual you have to be sure to untick the "free trial" of McAfee.

What gets me is that Adobe obviously doesn't mind the bad PR very publicly and continuously associating themselves with John McAfee, whose escapades on some Caribbean island a couple of years ago were miles beyond scandalous. I guess they couldn't prove that he had that guy murdered (John managed to keep himself beyond the reach of the law), but it sure looked that way. Playboy above the law, that's his image.

 

[Pulsar]

I'm surprised that on a tech site like this no one is complaining about the fucking auto-installers and services that something like adobe reader installs. Adobe reader and the other adobe products do not NEED 7 resident services / processes running all the time. Yet they install it, and if you disable them they will re-install them every single time they do ANYTHING.

It's not just the sign of a bad program - it's malicious. When I install a program I don't expect it to install a single fucking permanently resident service on my computer. You can start them when you need them and shut them down when you close, but don't install them and leave them running all the fucking time.

 

[CZroe]

I'm surprised that on a tech site like this no one is complaining about the fucking auto-installers and services that something like adobe reader installs. Adobe reader and the other adobe products do not NEED 7 resident services / processes running all the time. Yet they install it, and if you disable them they will re-install them every single time they do ANYTHING.



It's not just the sign of a bad program - it's malicious. When I install a program I don't expect it to install a single fucking permanently resident service on my computer. You can start them when you need them and shut them down when you close, but don't install them and leave them running all the fucking time.

What's worse is when they default to running all the time whether you use it or not, it launches manually when you need it anyway (by association or plug-in), and then it has 20 different ways to launch it when you wouldn't need it (desktop, quick launch, system tray, start menu, browser bar, Explorer extension, etc, etc, etc). It's like they sat down and decided to use every single method available for integrating into Windows regardless of need because they thought it made them seem more professional.

 

[CZroe]

What's worse is when they default to running all the time whether you use it or not, it launches manually when you need it anyway (by association or plug-in), and then it has 20 different ways to launch it when you wouldn't need it (desktop, quick launch, system tray, start menu, browser bar, Explorer extension, etc, etc, etc). It's like they sat down and decided to use every single method available for integrating into Windows regardless of need because they thought it made them seem more professional.

I stopped using Acrobat a long time ago but I always thought it was hilarious to see an update prompt screw up Acrobat when you needed it. Even though it takes over and is essentially always running with update checkers in the background, it still always seemed to prompt for an update when you'd actually open a PDF (eg, when you need it). The prompt would declare itself modal while appearing behind the disabled full-screen window (that you can't minimize or move to get to the prompt). This would often make it impossible to load a bank statement or something in a browser until you launched Acrobat outside the browser, updated, and reloaded everything (restart).

 

[mikeymikec]

I find it amusing / bind-boggling how Adobe Acrobat Reader (we seem to be back at that name again) has reached version 12 and we still don't have an update system that "just works".

I've very occasionally seen an old version prompt the user to update to the new version, but for probably every 50 instances where say v10 thinks that it's the latest version available (even after telling it to check for updates) despite a major new version being available for some time, there's been one instance I've witnessed where it works in the way one would expect.

I can understand that some corporates would prefer a piece of software to stay on major version X and only download security updates, so it doesn't break whatever internal system that they've got, but I would have thought that there'd be an obvious opt-in option to enable that sort of behaviour.

I'm surprised that on a tech site like this no one is complaining about the fucking auto-installers and services that something like adobe reader installs. Adobe reader and the other adobe products do not NEED 7 resident services / processes running all the time. Yet they install it, and if you disable them they will re-install them every single time they do ANYTHING.

If Adobe was the only company doing this then I might get more annoyed about it. On a heck of a lot of systems with Google software installed, there's usually more than one update system triggered to start automatically, despite there being supposedly unified Google Update systems.

Foxit Software also likes to have a "Cloud" product that comes with Reader that, even if the user uninstalls it, when a new Reader update is downloaded, the Cloud service gets put back on, and the update service switched back to automatic.

 

[William Gaatjes]

I keep it installed in case anything needs it.

But for a 200 year old program, it is constantly demanding to be updated.

And every time, it has an interface that tries to install more junk with other things to install listed with checkmarks to install them on another part of the screen I have to notice each time and uncheck, and every time it defaults to a setting of 'automatically install updates' and I have to notice and change it to manual updates.

I recently found a useful feature in firefox. You can select "Ask to activate" for individual plug-ins. I got the adobe flash plug-in this setting and when flash is used on a website, firefox will ask if flash needs to be "allowed". When i think i can thrust the site, i enabled when needed, otherwise i decline and keep flash disabled.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Foxit Software also likes to have a "Cloud" product that comes with Reader that, even if the user uninstalls it, when a new Reader update is downloaded, the Cloud service gets put back on, and the update service switched back to automatic.

Yeah, i found that out to. Very annoying. It would be nice if they would ask to re-enable the service in case a user would like to use it during an update. Otherwise, foxit should just remember the old settings...

 

[AznAnarchy99]

I remember when the iPhone first came out and everyone was all upset that it didn't have Flash support. In hindsight, that was possibly the best thing that happened to the internet. It finally forced web developers to start designing their sites without it.

I took it off my main Windows computer a while back and I honestly don't miss it. While Chrome has it built in, it's pretty muck kept quarantined from the rest of the system. Even then, I still use Flash Block and only allow it to load on whitelisted sites. There's no reason to actually have it installed on the OS level. Even with Firefox and IE, I don't often come across sites that require it.

Yeah everyone complained and Android touted as a huge feature. It was horrible on my Android.

 

[Red Squirrel]

If you're using flash, update it!

There are several recent zero-day exploits out there.

Even if you update, there will be another 0 day the next day anyway. :biggrin: updating flash is like trying to brush your teeth while eating oreos.

It should still be done once in a while though but don't expect it to do much. I wish less stuff would rely on flash so I could just not even bother having it at all. Though in Linux lot of stuff does not even work properly anyway as some sites that try to detect if you use flash often detect wrong and say you don't have it. There's a local news site that does that, and it pisses me off because they don't even have a text version of the article.

 

[Linux23]

checked my main rig and i have zero adobe software installed and don't think i'm planning on installing any of it.

 

[who?]

John McAfee sold that business years ago.

 

[Platypus]

Flash and JAVA both make my career a complete nightmare

Funny, they keep people in my industry employed


Flash is utter garbage, uninstall it. It will break some sites no doubt, but nothing that actually matters in the end for most people. Yes there are exceptions. It's a relic that needs to be put to bed.

A friend of mine just dropped 14 CVE's in Flash this past month alone, this shit needs to go.