QA:Camino 2.1.x and Flash

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Revision as of 15:16, 5 December 2011 by Sardisson (talk | contribs) (→‎Blocking Insecure Versions: add more about what happens on sites which do flash-detection)
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Many versions of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in have severe and actively-exploited security holes. Since Apple is no longer actively upgrading the copies of the Flash plug-in that once shipped with Mac OS X, Camino 2.1 introduces two methods to help protect users from insecure versions of the plug-in.

Blocking Insecure Versions

Camino prevents copies of the Flash plug-in older than certain versions from being loaded and, when the website does not do its own Flash detection, shows a placeholder indicating that Flash has been disabled for security reasons. If you see the placeholder, you should visit the Adobe website to download the lastest Flash Player plug-in installer.

Note, however, that sites which perform their own Flash detection will prevent Camino’s placeholder message from being displayed; in these cases, the sites will often claim that you do not have Flash installed.

Enabling Flash animation blocking on PowerPC Macs

Unfortunately, Adobe ceased development of Flash Player for PowerPC Macs with version 10.1 and is no longer providing security updates for version 10.1, which is vulnerable to a number of security holes that are actively being exploited.

Because of this, Camino 2.1 turns on the “Block Flash animations” feature (present in the Web Features preference pane) by default on PowerPC Macs. This feature prevents all Flash from loading, displaying a placeholder in the web page instead, while allowing you to selectively display any Flash plug-in content that is critical to your browsing. You can load a given Flash element a single time by clicking on the placeholder. If you want to load all Flash content on a given website every time you visit, you can add an exception for that site. See our Documentation on adding Flash exceptions for more information on this feature.