Upgrade Flash in Firefox

If you upgraded Firefox lately, you might have seen a message on the start page urging you to upgrade Flash. As of yesterday, something like 12 million people had clicked through to upgrade. That’s a great number.

However, when you got to the Adobe site, and clicked the “Agree and Install” button, instead just saving an installer file, you might have seen this:

Right there? That’s enough to deter me from this whole process, so I can definitely understand if it scared you off. But this is an important update, a security update, so you need to do it.

Fortunately, it’s very easy to get around this annoying development in Flash. (Their hearts are in the right place, automatic updates, but their implementation leaves something to be desired. Of course, the Adobe Updater makes you quit Firefox to update Photoshop, so this clearly isn’t their strong suit.)

For starters, head to Adobe’s Get Flash page. If you see that annoying bar, click on the [x] in the right corner:

Now, more towards the middle of the page, look for a link that says “click here to download.”

That will start downloading the normal installer we’ve come to know and love. Yeah, you’ll still have to restart Firefox, but you were going to need to do that, anyway.

There you have it, avoiding Adobe’s strange new extra software and getting Flash up-to-date with the latest (really, really important) security fixes.