While Evans made no mention of Apple's anti-Flash stance, Storms saw the decision as another example of the rocky relationship between Apple and Adobe over the technology. Chrome, meanwhile, automatically upgrades Flash Player in the background. People running Mozilla's Firefox or Google 's Chrome will have an edge during the interim.įirefox, for example, includes a plug-in checker that detects out-of-date add-ons, including Flash Player, and provides a link to Adobe's download site. The feature would be similar to what's now offered to Windows users. She urged Mac users to regularly monitor Adobe's security blog, which posts news of impending and available Flash updates, or subscribe to its RSS feed to stay atop fixes.Īdobe plans to produce an auto-update notification feature in a future release of Flash Player for the Mac, but declined to set a release date. 'Adobe recommends that users download the most up to date version of Adobe Flash Player from ,' a spokeswoman said. In the absence of Apple patching Flash, Adobe said Mac users were on their own for now. 'Users, who are likely running an outdated version, typically don't even know when Adobe issues patches.'

'What Apple is doing is separating themselves from the security community,' said Storms, who didn't cotton to Apple's decision.

That's not smart, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security. Instead, users will have to know about, locate, download and install those fixes themselves. The move also puts an end to Apple supplying Flash security updates to Mac OS X users as part of the operating system's patch process. 'We're happy to continue to support Flash on the Mac, and the best way for users to always have the most up to date and secure version is to download it directly from Adobe,' Apple spokesman Bill Evans said in reply to questions on Friday.

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