Adobe Flash Player For Mac Says Close Safari

If your Safari version is earlier than 10.0, follow the steps mentioned in For Mac OS X 10.8 and 10.9, or For Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7. For Mac OS X 10.11, macOS 10.12, and later Open Safari, and choose Safari > Preferences.

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We’re in the last few months of 2018, and Adobe Flash’s expiration date feels just within reach. That’s not just wishful thinking, either—Adobe has stated it will officially end support for the ailing web plugin in 2020.

Good riddance, we say.

For a long time, Adobe’s Flash Player was one of the most widely used browser plugins on the internet. Animation, web games, and entire websites were all powered by Flash. Even YouTube’s video player once ran on Flash. The only issue was that Flash has some major security issues that are incredibly easy to take advantage of, and as time went on, Flash became notoriously known as the entry point for many a security breach. Annoying ads, backdoor malware installation, and data collection have found their ways onto many a PC thanks to the holes in Flash’s security.

This all changed when HTML5 hit the scene, and since then Flash’s presence and necessity have dwindled. HTML5 is more powerful, easier for developers to use, and is much safer than Flash, and the overwhelming majority of popular websites migrated over to HTML5 ages ago. To be fair, there are still parts of the internet that run on Flash, but most of these are browser games, ads, and legacy sites that never made the jump to HTML5, so the probability that you need Flash enabled to browse your favorite websites in 2018 is low.

So if Flash is about to be abandoned by Adobe, is a security nightmare, and has been largely ignored by the majority of web developers for years now, you might as well stop using it, too. Here are a few methods for disabling Adobe Flash.

How to disable Adobe Flash

You have two options for disabling Adobe Flash in most browsers.

If you need or want to keep Adobe Flash around for whatever reason, you can set your browser to ask for permission to run the plugin. That way you will have full control over where and when Flash runs.

The other option is to option is to disable Flash from working altogether. You won’t get the permission request notifications, so you’ll have to re-enable flash manually if you need it to run on a specific website, but this is going to be the most secure option as Flash won’t be running at all.

Here’s how to achieve either outcome in all the major web browsers.

Safari

To force permissions: head to Safari > Preferences > Security, and click “Website Settings” next to the Internet plug-ins option. In this new menu, find and select Adobe Flash Player from the list of plug-ins, then set the When Visiting other websites option to “Ask”, then click “done” to save your changes and close the window.

To disable entirely: use the same method as above to open the Flash settings, but set the When Visiting other websites option to “Block” instead. Click “done” to save and close.

Chrome

While Chrome once included an option to disable browser plugins entirely, the latest versions of the browser removed that feature. Instead, the only option for disabling Flash on Chrome is to force permissions. Go to Settings > Advanced > Content Settings > Flash. Then, in the option for Flash, turn on “Ask First.” You can also add specific websites to either block entirely or allow to play Flash content without needing permission first.

Firefox

The most recent versions of Mozilla’s web browser will limit Adobe Flash (and other, similar plugins) and force permissions by default, so no change is necessary.

Internet Explorer

To force permissions: Click Gear icon to open settings tab, then go to ManageAdd-ons > Toolbars and Extensions > Shockwave Flash Object. Right click Shockwave Flash Object, and select More Information. In this window, select “remove all sites,” then delete the asterisk. Close the windows and restart your browser.

To disable entirely: Follow all the steps above, until you open the More Information window by right-clicking Shockwave Flash Object. Then, click the Disable button located at the bottom-right of the window.

Edge

Edge doesn’t provide an option requiring Flash to ask permission to run. Instead, you’ll only be able to disable the plugin entirely. To do so, navigate to Settings > View Advanced Settings, then turn the Use Adobe Flash option to “off.”

How to spot a bogus Flash update

If you’re running the most recently updated versions of any of the above browsers, you shouldn’t have to manually install an Adobe Flash update as the browser will do so automatically, and from the proper source directly from Adobe. So if you’re being randomly prompted to download and install one, it’s an ad hocking a fake version of Adobe and likely carrying some form of malicious software.

However, some recent versions of this tactic have actually included legit versions of Adobe Flash alongside whatever malware they’re packing. This is simply an attempt to dupe users and divert attention from whatever’s being sneaked onto their PC, so don’t fall for it. The good news is that disabling Adobe Flash will close these security gaps and even prevent those fake ads from showing up in the first place, though additional ad blocking software may be necessary to snuff them out entirely.

Adobe Flash Player For Mac Says Close Safari

Finally, if you’ve come here suspecting you’ve been infected by a bogus Adobe install, you’ll need to do a lot more than just disabling Flash to clean up your device. Be sure to check out our tips, guides, and software recommendations for anti-malware solutions to help you get started.

Yours truly long stopped using the standalone Flash Player so you could imagine I’m fairly puzzled that folks to this date continue to rely on Adobe’s plug-in. I know, if you’re into Flash games/apps and other Flash-authored content, there’s no escaping Adobe’s multimedia run-time.

Among the reasons I keep Flash miles away from my Macs: the instability, resource hoginess and excessive proneness to malware and other types of vulnerabilities and malicious attacks.

With this week’s release of Safari in OS X Mavericks, the Flash Player will now be protected by a new operating system feature called App Sandbox, Adobe announced Thursday…

Adobe Platform Security Strategist Peleus Uhley said in a blog post his company has “worked with Apple to protect Safari users on OS X”.

Safari users on OS X Mavericks can view Flash Player content while benefiting from these added security protections. We’d like to thank the Apple security team for working with us to deliver this solution.

App Sandboxing, as described by Apple, “provides a last line of defense against the theft, corruption, or deletion of user data if an attacker successfully exploits security holes in your app or the frameworks it is linked against”.

If you need more proof, Apple’s Mavericks features web page confirms that “Adobe Flash Player, Silverlight, QuickTime and Oracle Java plug-ins are sandboxed in Safari” on Mavericks.

Uhley details how Flash Player in Mavericks protects your from attacks:

For the technically minded, this means that there is a specific com.macromedia.Flash Player.plugin.sb file defining the security permissions for Flash Player when it runs within the sandboxed plugin process.

As you might expect, Flash Player’s capabilities to read and write files will be limited to only those locations it needs to function properly. The sandbox also limits Flash Player’s local connections to device resources and inter-process communication (IPC) channels.

Finally, the sandbox limits Flash Player’s networking privileges to prevent unnecessary connection capabilities.

And this from Apple’s Safari web page:

Adobe Flash Player For Mac

PDFs and widely used plug-ins like Adobe Flash Player, Silverlight, QuickTime and Oracle Java are sandboxed in Safari, which protects your system from harm should those plug-ins be exploited.

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And in addition to blocking cookies, Safari enhances your privacy “by preventing third-party websites from leaving other types of data — such as plug-in, cache, and local storage data — that could be used to track you online,” Apple states.

Even better, you can dive deep into Safari’s settings and tell the browser to run only certain plug-ins on trusted websites, for an added piece of mind.

Tell Safari which plug-ins are allowed to run on a per-website basis.

Mavericks also packs in some sophisticated power-saving technologies.

For example, Safari on Mavericks doesn’t waste resources by rendering content outside the focus of your browsing. And when web pages you visit contain plug-ins in their margins, Safari displays a preview of the plug-in content but waits until you click it before running it.

As for myself, I couldn’t care less about Adobe’s announcement.

My Macs have and always will be Flash-free. Matter of fact, I removed every single piece of Adobe software from all of my computers three years ago and never looked back. And whenever I find myself in a situation that cries for Flash, I don’t install the system-wide Flash Player and instead fire up Chrome which has the Flash plug-in built-in.

Photoshop?

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Thanks, but no thanks – I use Pixelmator instead.

Lightroom?

And so forth, and so forth…

Do you keep Flash plug-in installed on your system?

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What about other Adobe software?