Firefox Plugin Detection Mechanism Leads to 10 Million Flash Downloading

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According to the foreign media reports, Firefox developer Mozilla said recently that the newly-released Firefox upgraded version with flash auto-detect mechanism has led to 10 million latest flash downloading from Adobe website in a week.

Mozilla released Firefox latest upgraded version 3.5.3 and 3.0.14 last week which perfectly fixed three critical security flaws in the previous version. In addition, in order to prevent attackers using Firefox plugin flaw to attack its users, new versions will initially detect whether the flash player that Firefox using is the latest or not.

Mitchell Baker, chairman of Mozilla, said that in the last week, about 1/3 new version users have downloaded the latest flash player from Adobe after seeing the reminding message. "User response rate is very high, usually the response rate is only 5% when they see software upgrade information.", Mitchell said.

Mozilla security team personnel Jonathan Nightingale explains that the fact a large number of Firefox users would like to update flash player indicates the importance of network security issues. He said last week the reason why new Firefox has to detect whether the flash player it is using the latest version or not is: first, flash player is very popular; second, 80% Firefox users are still using the old version flash player according to a corresponding survey.

Adobe company also confirmed that the visitors of flash player upgrading webpage in the past week had a rapid growth. Adobe products security and privacy department director Brad Arkin appreciated the latest detecting mechanism very much by saying "For Adobe, it's definitely a good thing for massive users to have the upgraded flash, it assures their security and we are very happy to see Mozilla sending the flash upgrading message to its users."

P.S. You may be also interested in another blog about How to Delet Flash SWF Cache under Firefox.