14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has decided to stop bundling Flash Player in new Macs and will pass the update responsibility onto its users, who are now advised to obtain the application's latest versions from Adobe.
Flash Player has shipped with Macs for the past decade, until a few days ago, when people who tried out the newly released MacBook Air models, realized that it's not there anymore.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball reports that this only marks the beginning, as future Mac products will stop bundling the application as well.
He quotes Apple spokesman Bill Evans as saying "We’re happy to continue to support Flash on the Mac, and the best way for users to always have the most up to date and secure version is to download it directly from Adobe."
This means that Flash Player will continue to work on Mac, unlike iOS, where it's banned, but people who want it, need to install it themselves.
It also means that Flash Player updates will no longer be delivered through the Mac OS X Software Update feature, a move that bothers security experts.
"[…] This is clearly a bad sign for the hope that Apple is committed to securing the Mac platform," says Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at anivirus vendor Sophos.
"Flash does not currently ship with the ability to update itself, which will leave the vast majority of users of Safari vulnerable to attack," he explains.
The researcher makes a valid point, because it's very unlikely that many Mac users, who are used with getting updates through Apple, will notice the lack of Flash Player patches and will go looking for them on their own.
And even if Adobe plans to include update functionality in future versions of Flash Player for Mac, this doesn't solve the problem for millions of current installations.
Under these circumstances, the most sensible thing for Apple to do, would be to wait and deliver Adobe's first self-update-capable Flash Player version before pulling the plug on it.