Deployment,Management,OS X August 22, 2012 at 5:24 am

But wait there’s more! Flash Player 11.4

Just when we thought that the installer for Adobe Flash Player could not get worse, version 11.4 is released and revises our expectations yet again.

As has been discussed on the Mac Enterprise Mailing list and as researched by Greg Neagle on his blog, 11.4 has some new quirks.  One such quirk is that it can only be installed on the startup volume using the new silent install method.  This means that you cannot bake it into InstaDMG, SIU Images, etc.  If you do not use Adobe’s method for installing Flash Player, you will end up with a completely broken System Preferences Pane for Flash Player (As discussed here).

Also of note, using the new silent install method, one cannot install at login window either.  There must be a user logged in for the install to work using Adobe’s silent install method.

This type of behavior is far from acceptable and causes one to wonder why the Flash Player Team insists upon reinventing the wheel with the Flash Installer (arguably a worse wheel).  A proper Apple Package would deliver all the components, with the proper permissions and it would make Admins happy.  If they still want the pretty interface, why not just wrap the .pkg in a .app as they have been for a while now?  Hopefully the Flash Team will take the fair criticism from the Mac Admin community and come up with a workable solution for the enterprise.

Nate Walck

Nate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, Inc in San Francisco, CA. He runs afp548.com along with Sam Keeley and is one of the founding members of the ##osx-server IRC channel on freenode.net. He loves being involved in the Mac Admin community and using Open Source projects whenever possible, especially Munki, The Luggage and Puppet.

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