Comments on: Helping users keep plugins updated

By: sikiş

sikiş — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:40:05 +0000

I am in agreement with a concept mentioned by Larry Seltzer in his first post above(#2) “Perhaps the plugin should check at all startups?”. However, rather than check at EVERY startup, a better policy should be once a day at the browser’s first startup. Users would launch the browser that would only take them to a blank page with the statement along the lines of “The browser is currently checking for updated plugins, please wait a moment while this is accomplished. Thank you for your patience”. If any plugins need updating, they are then redirected to a page from Mozilla to update them (as mentioned elsewhere on Mozilla’s site) or directly to the vendor’s update site for the plugin. If no updates are needed, then the browser should direct the user to their homepage or other startup page listed within their preferences.

By: Jim Huneycutt

Jim Huneycutt — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:40:19 +0000

Answer to my own question how to disable the bloody nag screen:

I set the value of browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone to “ignore” and the redirect has stopped. Took me half a day of googling to find this though. Whenever one of these new “features” gets dreamed up, why doesn’t the nag screen also tell you the above fix so you can kill the blasted message if you so chose, security warnings duly noted, etc.

I my case I HAD updated the browser with the latest version of Flash, but for some reason Firefox could not detect it. I verified I had the latest using the Adobe Flash test page.

I hope someone else finds the page redirect config useful.

Thank you.

By: Jim Huneycutt

Jim Huneycutt — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 02:50:07 +0000

Please tell me how to turn this blasted check off. I manage a lot of public access computers and I do NOT want public users installing ANYTHING. The message scares the crap out of the users and then they cannot install the plugin, even if they could figure out how, because they do not have permission to do so. I in fact periodically update the plugins as admin, but there is a delay in doing this.

HELP!

By: VanillaMozilla

VanillaMozilla — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:47:47 +0000

Gee, thanks for that check. I didn’t know I even had Flash installed.

Now, can we please get notification of Firefox updates? See bugs 318855 and 407875. I know they’re being worked on, but very, very slowly. The one bug report is almost 4 years old now.

By: Matle

Matle — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:30:26 +0000

I suggest removing Flash Plugin from Firefox, now that Adobe decided to leave the road of business ethics and forces installation of completely unrelated, potentially dangerous software on Flash Player updates. It doesn’t matter if the user updates or not, in both ways he’s having a big risk now.

By: Conor

Conor — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:23:43 +0000

This sounds like an issue I am running into. I have display on a Linux box for a client which is showing a series of webpages which use flash. Everything is up-to-date. (Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, Firefox 3.0.14 etc). The page loads and displays fine for about 24 hours and then randomly decides it does not have the correct version of Flash! Very strange since the website remains the same and no one is touching the computer(the keyboard and mouse are removed!).
Is it checking against some version number on the website which perhaps is not compatible with the latest linux flash release?

By: jesse Ruderman

jesse Ruderman — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:55:20 +0000

What if we gave users instructions for triggering Flash’s update mechanism, rather than pointing them to download an installer for a new version? I’m pretty sure the update mechanism doesn’t try to shovel other things onto your computer.

By: Daniel Veditz

Daniel Veditz — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 06:41:50 +0000

We’re not too happy about that, either. In the past the Adobe download page served a plain installer, not this download manager thing with opt-out marketing tie-ins. Unfortunately what you got is now the default experience for getting Flash player from Adobe’s site, and I hope unhappy Flash users let them know how they feel about it.

In the face of active wide-spread attacks and given the number of vulnerable Firefox users it seemed better to do something than nothing, and the best we could come up with quickly (and legally) was to link to Adobe’s site. In the future we hope we can come up with a better experience in cooperation with plugin vendors. For this experiment we didn’t have the time to wait for the glacially slow corporate business negotiations that would require.

By: Daniel Veditz

Daniel Veditz — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 06:38:05 +0000

By: deepnet

deepnet — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:34:46 +0000

Is there any way that a virus could be spoofing this message?

I got this message earlier today and since I know I’ve put off updating Flash I clicked on the install link, because I trust Firefox and even though I knew it might just be a marketing ploy.

But to my dismay it also installed a suspicious-looking program called “Adobe Download Manager” which looked like it was doing the upgrade. But now I’ve just noticed that an icon called “McAfee Security Scan” has appeared on my desktop that runs a program in a new Program Files folder of the same name, even though I have not installed ANYTHING except the Adobe upgrade today.

There is an entry for it in the Add / Remove Programs control panel of Windows too. The timestamps on the files are from about the same time I would’ve run the Adobe install.

Is anyone else seeing this? Is there any McAfee component to the Adobe upgrade? I’m concerned that I have just installed a virus.

One other note is that my internet access is through Comcast on the East Coast of the U.S. and they are known for running things that intercept and alter network traffic like systems to suppress Bittorrent downloads. They also distribute McAfee for free with service… could they be piggybacking somehow on the Adobe install to force installation of the McAfee product?

…okay, I’m seeing notes elsewhere on the net that seem to indicate that there was an automatically-checked checkbox in a dialog related to the Adobe upgrade that I must have missed and this McAfee product is a “lite” crippleware product installed as a result of it. So I am assuming that this was all just an opportunistic marketing operation to take advantage of peoples’ trust in Firefox.

This really sucks. I am not going to trust Firefox again.