Attached are the screenshots -- of when Chrome loads the outdate version of System flash during the 6-7 minute window. 

We are able to reproduce this issue on Windows and Mac OS for most recent major versions of Chrome. 

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Any movement on this issue -- we are an edu-tech with some legacy flash content that we are actively phasing out. 

We have some large districts which are affected by this issue because schools wipe their machines regularly, or kids a different computer in the lab everyday. 

We would love to know if this is ever going to be resolved. Thanks so much! 

Amal 

Is there a the reason the admins don't either?:
 • uninstall system flash (if using component flash is OK)
 • keep system flash up-to-date

(I get that you're in a tough spot to make that recommendation if you own the content but aren't administrators of the client machines.)

Will, I think this is as simple as calling PluginFinder->GetPluginMetadata->GetSecurityStatus in GetSystemPepperFlash, does that sound right to you? I'm not too familiar with the plugin_win.json code.

That is exactly the message we are giving them -- and our support engineers are working diligently on this. 

However, our many of our affected customers are really large public school districts with really limited resources. So, its really challenging getting a quick turn around, or make changes mid-school year, etc. 

Also, to be clear this is also a problem on OSX -- it affects any first time launch of Chrome on Windows or OSX.

re: #6 you mean just ignore system flash if out of date, which would force an earlier on-demand download of component flash?

perhaps another solution would be to trigger an on demand component update of flash if this banner ever shows.

re: #8 yes, that's what I mean. The other solution seems like it would also work (though I don't know the details), do you prefer pursuing that?

so the logic would be iff:

 - version of component updater is 0.0.0.0 (i.e. has never been downloaded)
 - system flash is considered "out of date" [1]

then ignore system flash and pull component update.

I don't think it's as simple as returning false from GetSystemPepperFlash in the case that system is "out of date", because if all candidate flash installations are "out of date" we still want to use the highest version and display the banner.

[1] the version of Flash is lower than the minimum 'secure' version in the plugins json file - e.g. https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/chrome/browser/resources/plugin_metadata/plugins_win.json

re # 10 -- that logic makes the more sense and those are the correct values for when this manifests. The component updater is 0.0.0.0 and it uses the out dated version of system flash instead. 

I'm not sure how bug fixes to the component updater logic are distributed, would it be retro fitted for all versions of Chrome, or just newer versions moving forward?

Thanks for getting on this guys. 

Any fix we land for this would only be for newer versions moving forward. If the change is simple enough we could try to merge it to Chrome 60 so that it's in Chrome stable-channel before the start of the next academic year.

If you have teachers / students trying to work around this in the short term, one thing you can tell them to do is:
 • Navigate to chrome://components.
 • Click "Check for Update" under "Adobe Flash Player".
(This will short-circuit that 6-minute period and unblock the user but is not a good long-term solution.)


That's a good point about being conditional on the component update version. I think we can strengthen the logic to:
"""
If and only if:
 • system flash is considered "out of date" [1]
 • and no other non-0 Flash is present (command line or component)
Ignore system flash (and therefore register fake flash).
"""

Awesome -- and that the exact workaround we are letting them know about. 

Getting this is Chrome 60 would be really great -- September is our big back to school rush, so its ideal timing.

Our students are in 45 computer labs so 6-7 lost debugging is a large percentage away from their lesson time. 

Let me know if there is anything else I can do, or you guys need any other info. 

Thanks again for the quick response. 

Amal

For those watching this thread.  I wouldn't advise waiting on a solution from Chrome.  It's entirely possible that we won't be able to get this change into Chrome 60 (August release).

Regardless, the best technical recommendation would be to uninstall the system instance of Flash Player and rely exclusively on the component updater to keep Flash Player up to date, especially since it was built to seamlessly handle the new install case (i.e. if Flash Player isn't present it fetches it the first time Flash content is accessed, without any interruption of user prompt - invisibly - the initial load just looks like it takes a little longer).

There are a sufficient number of regular Flash updates (potentially more than monthly), that make it somewhat impractical for a limited support staff to maintain.

Having a stronger rational for why this mixed use case is necessary would be helpful, as it stands it's not clear why that configuration would be desirable (i.e. it seems to take all the disadvantages of both solutions w/ out the benefits).

In our case, we tell our users to uninstall system flash because if they are using Chrome as a primary browser, its embedded and there is no need for it. 

However, they use their computers for many different applications, and sometimes they need system flash for some random software they use on I.E for instance. 

We are educating them about the importance of agreeing to auto updates of system flash if they have it installed -- but again we dealing with 10,000s of machines per district sometimes and IT admins with very different levels of bandwidth, skill, and available resources.

That said, Chrome is our recommended browser, and we ask they use the group policy setting to allow flash to alway run for our domain. We do not ask them to download system flash when using Chrome. 

This is perhaps a fine point, but it's worth pointing out that system-wide Flash is installed separately for Chrome versus other browsers (IE, Firefox), because Chrome relies on the PPAPI version of Flash, while other browsers rely on the NPAPI version of Flash.

i.e. you can see from https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/ that when installing Flash you have to pick one version or the other, and I believe (though this would be good to double-check) that the two installs are managed separately in Windows (i.e. PPAPI can be (un)installed without NPAPI being (un)installed - they show up as different programs in Add/Remove Programs).

Right -- thats a good point. We can make sure that they remove the version of system flash which targets Chrome.

Agreed!

Hi.  Is there a plan to load the updated internal flash version when outdated system flash is detected(before the 6 minute mark)?

Thanks for checking.

Our recommendation would be for administrators to use either system level installs or component updates, but not both.  The desired behavior (i.e. in-line dynamic fetch) can be obtained by using the component updater exclusively.