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Brrrr, Reddit still scares me. And these 'Adobe Flash Updates' when I start a Windows machine don't reassure me either.


Ever since 10.1 the Flash updater is ridiculously fast and never asks me to restart my system. Easily the best automatic update experience among the various programs that constantly need to update themselves.


I think Chrome is still the winner here. I don't even notice when it upgrades itself.


Now that Flash is baked into Chrome, if you only use Chrome you never have to worry about Flash updates. Last time a new version was announced, I was surprised to find it had already been automatically updated for me.


I'm still a Firefox devotee, so I don't have first-hand experience with Chrome.

However, I'm not sure there's a good way for Flash to provide that kind of seamless update experience in the same way. It's not an application in itself, so it can't check for updates with the consistency that a browser can, and when it does run it's always to immediately execute whatever flash content was requested, so there's less leeway for it to start updating itself in the background and potentially impact performance. Currently it pops up a window on startup every once in a while (I skipped it the first time and it didn't bug me again for maybe 2 weeks) and its maybe 2 clicks and 20 seconds of downloading. It's not Chrome-level seamless, but it's pretty damn good and I was surprised by how good it was compared to Acrobat and every other updater I've used in the past.


Chrome has a background process that does the updating for it, Adobe could in fact use the same code Google does if they wanted (and it'd likely be much higher quality than anything Adobe wrote for themselves!): http://code.google.com/p/omaha/ http://code.google.com/p/update-engine/


Flash isn't an application? Sure, it's primary usage is as a plugin, but you can be sure it's an application too. And even if there aren't EXEs anywhere (there are), why wouldn't they bundle one specifically for auto-updates. The rest of the industry needs to get on board with auto updates. Or Windows and Mac need to work on some sort of package management.


I mean application from the user perspective, i.e. you don't go: "Hey I'll start up Flash and do something with it." Other things start Flash, the user never just starts Flash on their own.




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