Skip to main content

Outdated installs of Adobe Flash Player soon won’t load in Internet Explorer 11

Although Microsoft Edge takes center stage as the main browser of Windows 10, Internet Explorer 11 still lurks in the background in case the user happens to wander over to an older website. However, it is also provided to customers who refuse to jump on the Windows 10 bandwagon. Because of this, the Microsoft Edge team keeps the older browser up to date, which includes a plan to expand its out-of-date ActiveX control blocking feature on October 11.

According to the team, outdated versions of Adobe Flash Player will be blocked in Internet Explorer 11 starting next month. This ban includes all versions of Adobe Flash Player prior to 21.0.0.198, and all versions of Adobe Flash Player Extended Support Release prior to 18.0.0.241. However, this block will only apply to Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Recommended Videos

“Customers running Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 are not impacted by this change,” said Jasika Bawa, Program Manager of Enterprise & Security. “By default, Windows Update will automatically install important Flash updates as they become available for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge on those systems.”

On the enterprise side, Bawa noted that out-of-date ActiveX controls aren’t blocked in the Local Intranet Zone or the Trusted Sites Zone. Thus, to see what happens when a user wanders onto an older site using out-of-date Flash ActiveX controls, Bawa provided a few steps for administrators to follow in order to generate the Flash-based warning.

First, administrators can install the latest cumulative update for Internet Explorer 11, and then open a command prompt to stop downloading updated versions of the “verionlist.xml” file. After that, they can download a test version of that file from Microsoft to the appropriate destination on the hard drive, rename it, and then restart the browser.

The result will pull up the out-of-date ActiveX control blocking notice, which will state that “Flash Player was blocked because it is out of date and needs to be updated.” Users will be given a button to “Update” or to “Run this time.”

“After you’re done testing, replace this file with its production version from here. We don’t recommend manually changing the versionlist.xml file in your production environment,” Bawa added.

Adobe Flash at one time pushed the Internet into a new generation of how we consume information, moving the World Wide Web from a flat, 2D experience to a visually robust, interactive interface spanning full animations, embedded video, and much more. But over time, the technology seemingly became one security mess after another, and now web pages feel anchored down by the vast amount of Flash content visually and covertly filling up the pages.

Now that the Internet is moving to HTML5, Flash is becoming the secondary medium. However, until Flash is completely wiped from the Internet scene, we’ll have to rely on Adobe to stay on top of the security issues, and companies like Microsoft to keep web surfers safe against running outdated, non-secure versions of Flash Player. The latest version of Flash Player appears to be version 23.0.0.162, which was actually launched on Tuesday.

Kevin Parrish
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kevin started taking PCs apart in the 90s when Quake was on the way and his PC lacked the required components. Since then…
ChatGPT now interprets photos better than an art critic and an investigator combined
OpenAI press image

ChatGPT's recent image generation capabilities have challenged our previous understing of AI-generated media. The recently announced GPT-4o model demonstrates noteworthy abilities of interpreting images with high accuracy and recreating them with viral effects, such as that inspired by Studio Ghibli. It even masters text in AI-generated images, which has previously been difficult for AI. And now, it is launching two new models capable of dissecting images for cues to gather far more information that might even fail a human glance.

OpenAI announced two new models earlier this week that take ChatGPT's thinking abilities up a notch. Its new o3 model, which OpenAI calls its "most powerful reasoning model" improves on the existing interpretation and perception abilities, getting better at "coding, math, science, visual perception, and more," the organization claims. Meanwhile, the o4-mini is a smaller and faster model for "cost-efficient reasoning" in the same avenues. The news follows OpenAI's recent launch of the GPT-4.1 class of models, which brings faster processing and deeper context.

Read more
Microsoft’s Copilot Vision AI is now free to use, but only for these 9 sites
Copilot Vision graphic.

After months of teasers, previews, and select rollouts, Microsoft's Copilot Vision is now available to try for all Edge users in the U.S. The flashy new AI tool is designed to watch your screen as you browse so you can ask it various questions about what you're doing and get useful context-appropriate responses. The main catch, however, is that it currently only works with nine websites.

For the most part, these nine websites seem like pretty random choices, too. We have Amazon, which makes sense, but also Geoguessr? I'm pretty sure the point of that site is to try and guess where you are on the map without any help. Anyway, the full site list is as follows:

Read more
Fun things to ask ChatGPT now that it remembers everything
ChatGPT on a laptop

If you hadn't heard, ChatGPT's memory just got a whole lot better. Rolled out across the world to Plus and Pro users over the past few days, ChatGPT's various models can now reference almost any past conversation you had. It doesn't remember everything word for word, but can pull significant details, themes, and important points of reference from just about anything you've ever said to it.

It feels a little creepy at times, but ChatGPT can now be used for much more personalized tasks. OpenAI pitches this as a way to improve its scheduling feature to use it as a personal assistant, or to help you continue longer chats over extended periods of time. But it's also quite fun to see what ChatGPT can tell you by trawling throughh all your chatlogs. It's often surprising some of the answers it spits out in response.

Read more