Last week I went on a little rant about Adobe’s inane method of installing Flash on Windows (in Firefox). I received a few emails from people pointing out the much better way of installing Flash - just download the .exe installer! Sounds simple, but good luck actually finding that on Adobe’s website (while using Firefox anyway - they do UA sniffing to make you use the extension). I’d known that this existed and this was exactly what I was expecting. I just couldn’t find that page with minimal effort, so I thought I’d rant.
I was also directed towards the Installing the Flash Plugin article on the Mozilla Support website. The support moderators have dealt with the experience I had and spent a lot of time getting the support article right.
That article explain 2 methods of installing Flash, neither of with involves Adobe DLM:
- Install Flash through the missing plugin dialog. This involves simply going to a page that requires Flash (without the usual JS fallback, ie. not YouTube) and getting prompted by Firefox to install Flash for you.
- Installing via the .exe installer. There is a direct link to the page on Adobe’s site where you can download the actual installer.
So there are sane ways to get Flash installed. Adobe just doesn’t promote them.