Is Adobe Flash safe to use on MacBookPro Sierra 10.12.5? If not, what are my alternatives and how do I get them? Thank you in advance
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Samantha Franklin
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How Do I Avoid Adobe Flash?
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The Adobe Flash web-browser plug-in gets a bad reputation, not completely deserved. It is a very sophisticated browser plug-in that can do anything from playing videos, animations, interactive graphics, 2D games, 3D games, complex apps, and more. I've seen developers create entire operating systems that run inside the Flash plug-in, inside your browser, in a web page.
It is because Flash is such a complete development environment that it has problems. If you have a browser plug-in that can only play video, or can only show 3D models, then there's only so much hackers can do to use it as a tool for bad things. But since Flash can do so much, it can be abused a lot too.
Adobe has done a great job fixing security holes as they are found. And issues seem to come up less and less. Many times when you hear about a security issue with Flash, the problem has already been fixed.
Another issue is that some malicious threats have masqueraded as "Flash installers" -- so you get an alert that you need to install/update Flash and you click on the link. But the link isn't from Adobe and doesn't install Flash. The alert could just have easily said "Update macOS" or "Update Microsoft Office."
So should you install Flash? Well, the first question is: do you use it? A lot of video sites use Flash and most web-based games use Flash. I'm a web-based game developer myself, and my sites use a lot of Flash (look me up on Amazon and you'll see I've written some books on Flash game development).
So if yo use Flash, then you need to have it installed. Otherwise, you can't do the things you want to do online.
So to install Flash the safe way, only do it from the Adobe site. https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ is the ONLY place you should ever go to get Flash.
Then, if you see an update alert, never trust any download link. Instead, just go to the Adobe site. Or, better yet, once you have installed Flash you will see a Flash Player entry in System Preferences. You can use that to securely check for updates and install them.
Also note that in Sierra, Safari will allow you to block or allow Flash on a per-site basis. I did a video on this recently: https://macmost.com/enable-flash-in-safari.html. So you can always install it, and only enable it on sites where you know you need Flash right now, and allow sites in the future on a per-site basis.