We reported this morning on the new Flash Player 11.2 update that’s beneficial to developers, especially for games. None of that really affected the end user of Flash though. There was another update brought along with Flash 11.2 that does.
Adobe announced some changes to its Flash Player Updater. This is the little annoying box that pops up every time you restart your computer asking you to install the newest version of Flash. It’s about to get a lot less annoying and bette for consumers who don’t take precautions when they are searching for updates.
When you install Flash Player 11.2, you will be asked to choose an update method. These include “install updates automatically when available,” “notify me when updates are available” and “never check for updates.” The default is set to install updates automatically and you probably should keep it that way.
The new updates works like so: Flash will check for updates every hour until it hears back from Adobe. If there is no update available, it will not check again for 24 hours. This will all be done in the background and never interrupt your experience. As a nice touch, the background updater will also update every browser you have installed.
The background update isn’t permanent though. If the update is important enough that Adobe wants you to know about it, they will bring the lovely update box to the forefront of your desktop again. This is much better, however, than having to sit through updates for every little security update.
As a final note, Adobe will be dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 with the latest security release for Flash Player 10.3 for those who can’t update to 11. On a related note, the current background updater is only available for Windows XP machines and later. A Mac version is currently in the works.
