Adobe on Monday announced the availability of Flash Player Protected Mode for Mozilla Firefox. Essentially a sandboxed version of the popular browser plugin, Flash Player Protected Mode for Firefox is currently in beta. Hit the jump for more.
Adobe may have brought the curtain down on the development of Flash for mobile devices, but it has not entirely forsaken existing users of its Flash Player for Android. Seeing as the browser plugin is so infamous for its numerous bugs and security vulnerabilities, it would be criminal on Adobe’s part if it were to completely extricate itself from Flash for Android all of a sudden. Last month, the company released the last major Flash update for Android, adding Android 4.0 support to the plugin. Now it has released a minor followup to that update in the form of Flash Player 11.1.112.61.
Adobe last month said it no longer intended to take on HTML5 with its Flash platform across mobile browsers, hailing the former as the “best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” It also made it clear that the release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook was going to be its last for mobile browsers. But following the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Adobe announced it would also be releasing a minor update in December to add Flash and AIR support to the world’s first Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) device, which did not support these technologies at launch.
While it's not unusual for companies to promise a variety of things “in time for the holidays,” a patch for a zero-day bug being exploited in the wild is usually not one of them. But that’s something you can look forward to if you have Adobe Reader and/or Acrobat 9.x for Windows. In a security advisory issued on Tuesday, Adobe warned of a “critical” vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat that is being exploited in the wild. Hit the jump for more.
Early adopters of Google’s new flagship phone, the Galaxy Nexus, were a little concerned when Adobe Flash didn’t come pre-loaded on the device, and was nowhere to be found in the Android Market. With the recent announcement that Adobe was walking away from mobile Flash, many users expected this to be the abrupt end of the line. Now Adobe has explained its position in a more nuanced way than before, and users won’t be left out in the cold just yet. 
Research In Motion wants to make it clear that it intends to keep supporting and developing Adobe Flash for its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, even though Adobe itself is abandoning Flash on the mobile Web in order to "aggressively contribute to HTML5." Dan Dodge, President and CEO of RIM's QNX operations, announced RIM's continued commitment to Flash in a blog post.
We’re not too proud to admit it: maybe Steve Jobs had it right. Apple’s refusal to let Adobe’s Flash platform sully is famous in tech circles, and way back in April of 2010, Jobs penned a long, open letter explaining his dislike of Flash and championing HTML5 as an alternative. “Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind,” Jobs wrote, and it looks like Adobe finally got the memo: today, the company announced it was ceasing Flash Player development for mobile devices and refocusing its efforts on HTML5.
A computer science student at Stanford University has discovered a hole in Adobe Flash that could be used by an attacker to furtively enable the victim’s camera and microphone. The vulnerability is not in Flash itself, but the Adobe Flash Settings Manager page. More details about the vulnerability can be found after the jump.
Mobile devices are becoming an increasingly important battleground in the Web wars, one in which Adobe's Flash Player and HTML5 will fight most of their skirmishes. Adobe today announced its prize fighters in Adobe Flash Player 11 and Adobe AIR 3, both with support for full hardware accelerated rendering for 2D and 3D graphics.
Even though Steve Jobs retired, his mammoth, forward-looking hit-or-miss vision is still leaving its fingerprints all over the tech industry. Case in point: Adobe Flash. By now, everyone knows that Apple refused to allow Flash to run on iOS systems. For the Metro (read: mobile) version of IE10 in Windows 8, Microsoft’s not only blocking Flash functionality, it's jumping whole hog on the HTML5 bandwagon and restricting plug-ins entirely.Connect with MaximumPC
Featured Content
We introduce Intel's latest class of tablet killers and review 4 of the first Ultra...
Where have all the memorable videogame enemies gone?
This month's issue
Feature
11 Hardware Hacks
Feature
Overclock Your CPU
How-To
Supercharge Your Smartphone
Build It
A Powerful $830 Rig
Most Commented Articles
Latest Max PC Tweets
- maximumpc: Here's what the @horse_ebooks bookmarklet (http://t.co/brE6898A) does to Maximum PC: http://t.co/Y6OhO6zk15 hours 32 min ago
- maximumpc: Microsoft on Patents: Can't We All Just Get Along? http://t.co/g0vginvG17 hours 53 min ago
- maximumpc: Google Drive Cloud Storage: Is Google Preparing To Muscle In On Dropbox? http://t.co/lCWzeYmS18 hours 17 min ago
