How To Update Adobe Flash Player: A Walk-Through

Hand-Made Mac Tip:

How To Update Adobe Flash Player On A Mac — A Walk-Through
with Step By Step Pictures

I get many requests for how to do this, so I thought I'd make a tutorial.
I hope this is helpful and helps keep you SAFE from hackers!

So, you're surfing along on the Internet in Safari or whichever browser you choose and all of the sudden, this window pops up out of nowhere! It seems to do this fairly frequently!

Why? Because Adobe is constantly patching its software to keep the bad guys out and they need to send you an update. While you don't want to ignore these updates, you don't want to get tricked into putting something harmful on your computer by the bad guys pretending to be Adobe either.

Follow these steps to do it the safe way:

Here is the window that pops up. Even though this one may be legit, lets pretend it's not and go get it from the source making sure we are the one making all the calls.

You may have to repeat these steps if BOTH of these plugins have updates. Most times it's just one or the other. You will see a message that says you're up to date if none is needed. If an update is available, it will say so like shown in the next image.

Wow. 14 steps! They sure don't make it simple, do they  Why do we even need Adobe Flash anyway? 

It's one of those necessary evils that's called a plugin. It's like a supplement for our computers. Without it, we wouldn't be able to process certain multimedia content like videos or interactive graphs. Lots of banking websites still require it to make their websites function the way they were designed to be viewed by the visitor. They want to display information in a chart and it may have some type of animation. To you it may be overkill, but to the web designers, this is the choice they made. 

What if I don't care about updating it? Can't I just skip it? 

Sure, but you do so at your own risk. You could be allowing the plugin you are currently using to operate with a "hole" in it — one the bad guys could get through to compromise your security. Better safe than sorry.