Last week, Mozilla started placing a warning message on its welcome page, seen by users after they upgrade Firefox to the latest version, informing the user if they have an out of date Flash Player. Now the stats have been crunched, and the result is that 10 million people have clicked the link, doing more than Adobe's own efforts to keep people up to date.
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Member since:
2005-09-27
Member since:2005-07-06
my god ... lol @ billionaires .......... do you really think it is in their best interest to be dishonest. Businesspeopel do not get wealthy by being dishonest, they get wealthy by producing a product that people need, trust, and understand, it is in the best interest of the business owner to produce the best product possible.... my god ....... you people are really ignorant thinking that businesses are out to get you. The capitalist makes he world go round. Mutual profit for you and the business at hand.
Member since:2006-09-22
And where did the OP say anything about dishonesty? And by the way, your definition about how the business world works might hold true for your country (Utopia, perhaps?) but there are many, many companies that make quite some money by screwing consumers and other companies without offering anything valuable; the patent trolls being a prime example.
Member since:
2005-07-17
Perhaps this will finally cause Adobe to realize how terrible their updater really is and fix it. I doubt it, though...
Personally, I think the best (third party) updaters I've seen are Google's silent one (as much as I dislike resident programs, Google did a pretty good job with it) and I also like the Firefox approach, where it downloads updates without asking and subsequently installs them automatically on the next program restart.
Member since:
2005-10-02
Member since:2005-09-27
Member since:2006-02-06
I think the OP was talking about the fact that clicking on a link on your home page instructing you to download an executable is somewhat dumb.
I mean, what if a site managed to set firefox's home page in disguise? But, to be honest, I think it would be unlikely, though I never actually thought about it until now.
So, the question I believe we should be asking is: How hard would it be to, from a web site (anything more and the attacker wouldn't really need to have you clicking the link, right?), to change a user's home page on Firefox?
10 million infected people from downloading what appears to be a mozilla recommendation is a dreadful scenario.
Member since:2005-07-11
Member since:2006-01-03
Member since:2005-11-01
Member since:
2006-02-05
I somewhat sympathize with the "dumb user" comment, but in reality what "they" do affects all of us, directly or indirectly. Aside from that, it's not all the users' fault. I had to disinfect my boss's PC because he contracted a Flash-exploit virus from visiting CNN.com ( a 3rd-party ad provider had not appropriately vetted its content). He was desperate for my help as it was 2 days before he had to file his taxes.
Flash is just evil. Along with the 'sploits is the CPU-sucking performance because Adobe hasn't bothered to make it use the video decoding capabilities of modern GPUs. Yet I'm forced to use it because some vendor support sites insist on it. Freaking ridiculous. I hope HTML5 can displace the abomination that is Flash, but I'm not holding my breath.
@re_re: some business people do get wealthy by being dishonest. A few even get away with it. But that's no reason to throw the capitalist baby out with the bathwater.
Member since:
2009-09-16
I've been waiting for this sort of fix for a LONG time. I have countless flash installers on my "Downloads" folder and it's starting to irritate me aswell, though when I had linux (Ubuntu 9.04) installed, my Firefox managed to fetch the flashplugins without actually visiting Abobe's homepage. I just had to agree to the licenceagreement and the browser got the plugin automatically. I'm not sure about updating the plugin though.
I am constantly trying out new operatingsystems and I have to install these flashplugins many times in a month, so it would be great to have this feature, regardless of the OS.
Edited 2009-09-22 07:26 UTC
Member since:
2005-07-06
