How To Kill Flash on Your Mac
The End of Flash?
That might just be the way things will or should pan out over the next year or less. How may times have we all heard of multiple critical vulnerabilities within Adobe’s Flash Player over recent years? Way too many I think. So who is going to tell Adobe we have had enough you ask? Well good thing you asked, Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos did just that on Sunday via Twitter. Sure its Twitter, but its a start, and at least coming from a large firm who has some influence.
It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2015
Sure, I too doubt Adobe will say “Well Facebook thinks we should kill it, lets kill it!“. But my hope is they will get more pressure to retire Flash. Other big names have such as, YouTube & Netflix have already replaced Flash with HTML5. From what I gather, Facebook still has some video features that depend on Flash but they say they are working to replace that with HTML5 too.
Killing Flash on a Mac
Most vulnerabilities are almost always directed at Windows users. These new Flash exploits are not picky. Windows and Mac users are both potentially at risk. Below are a few quick steps to help remove Flash from your Mac using an uninstaller tool.
Check to see what version of OS X you are running first of course and then use these two links for grabbing the uninstaller.
- OS X 10.5 and later (Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, or Yosemite) download and run this one
- OS X 10.4 and 10.5 (Tiger or Leopard) download and run this one
So You Can’t Live Without Flash
If you find that your love for Flash is too deep or work apps that rely on Flash are a must, just remember to use Google Chrome. Chrome has a version of Flash that is baked right into the browser and all updates are handled by Google. Just keep Chrome up-to-date and you shouldn’t have too much to worry about. Ready, Set, Uninstall Flash!