Earlier today i was over at my sis place, and for shit and giggles I decided to 'check' the flash on her windows machine and play with some security tools. Well all I can say is that updating flash on firefox is not that straight forward on Windows 7 64bit. I wonder how people who are not computer savvy are supposed to do this?

It turns out that there are 2 versions of the flash player installed on the system. One for firefox (which should also work for netscape, opera, ...) and one ActiveX version for IE. So the first step: tools > addons > plugins. No adobe flash in the list, only 'shockwave flash'. Now Shockwave and flash used to be 2 different things, but anyway let's try to update it. It brings me to a screen that says that I have a missing plugin, adobe download manager. Cool, lets install that one first. Oops not possible, I'm offered to install it manually though. Sweet, I can download an xpi file. Execute that with firefox, nothing happens.

Long story short, I end up in a circle, even after adding adobe.com to the safe list in firefox. A couple of articles on the adobe website give an indication that there seems to be quite some tricks involved to get it updating.

Finally I fired up the software manager tool in windows, uninstalled every piece that said 'adobe flash' and then went back to the adobe website. Finally had the latest version running.

I'm not surprised so many people run with an outdated flash version. A trivial task that should require a 1 click ends up to be confusing and complicated. And a quick google takes me to a plethora of blogs reporting this for about 3-4 years.