Living without Adobe Flash

Lately we hear about new Adobe Flash vulnerabilities almost every single day.  It has become tiresome to update your own Adobe Flash version, let alone to try to get your family members and friends to do the same.  If you’re an administrator of a large number of computers then I’m sure all these updates are making your life miserable.

We at GlassWire also became tired of constantly updating Flash and we decided to permanently remove it from all our devices, and guess what?  It’s actually not a big deal to no longer have Flash installed.  In fact we found that living without Adobe Flash is easy!

Did you know that the latest versions of IE and Google Chrome come with Flash built in?  Obviously we aren’t major Chrome fans for obvious reasons and we recommend using Firefox as your primary browser, but you can keep Chrome on your Mac or PC just to use Flash if you need it.

You may be wondering why it’s safe to use the built in Flash in Chrome/IE, but it’s not safe to have Adobe Flash installed on your operating system.  The quick answer to that question is that it may not always be 100% safe to use Flash in Chrome even though it’s sandboxed for your protection.  We recommend you set all your browsers including Chrome to “click to play” mode.  Bryan Krebs has a useful article that explains how to set up “click to play” on the major operating systems and browsers.  “Click to play” turns Flash off by default where you must “click” to turn it on.  If there is an exploit out there then it makes it less likely to automatically exploit your computer when you’re set to “click to play” but even with “click to play” on it’s possible to get tricked into playing something that’s unsafe.

Fortunately we found that not having Flash on our computers doesn’t matter much these days.  Recently Youtube switched all their movies by default to HTML5 so you can still play Youtube as usual.  Due to most mobile devices not having Flash installed you’ll find most modern browsers can play the vast majority of media out there without having Flash installed at all.  Do you often come across videos you can’t play on your mobile device?  If not then it’s likely you won’t miss anything on your PC or Mac either.

Now the last thing to do after reading this is actually uninstall Flash.  Go to add/remove programs in Windows or your Mac settings, or check out these instructions.

Try living without Flash and we think you’ll find it’s great, plus no more annoying updates.  Please comment here and let us know your results of living Flash-free and please don’t even get us started on Java.  We assume you already uninstalled that one by now.