Today Adobe has released Flash Player 11.2 and AIR 3.2, where this Flash Player version for Windows contains a new “background updater”. Instead of users updating their Flash Player plugins whenever updates released by adobe to fix vulnerabilities or when new features are added, adobe added Flash Player Background Updater for Flash Player which from 11.2 version onwards automatically installs patches and updates silently without requiring the interaction from users, much like Google’s approach to Chrome for flash player plugin. All future updates for flash will be installed silently without any notifications, before or after performing the update.
How Flash Player Background Updater works
Enabling background updates for Flash Player
After installing flash player 11.2, a dialog box pops up that prompts the users to choose flash player update method, here user just needs to leave “ install updates automatically when available” option selected and need to click on “Done” button. You can always change this later from Flash Player Setting Manager in Control Panel.
From there Adobe Flash Player Background Updater has a scheduled task in Windows Task Scheduler and an Windows Service called “Adobe Flash Player Update Service”, both of these are necessary for AFPBU to keep flash player installation up-to-date with the latest enhancements and security fixes. Windows service will be inactive for most of the time until and unless it is launched by the scheduled task (as we mentioned above) to check for updates. So you can rest assured that your system resource and memory are not used by this service always.
Windows service will be inactive for most of the time until and unless it is launched when needed by the scheduled task (as we said above) to check for updates. So you can rest assured that your system resource and memory are not used by this service always.
Changing Flash Player Update settings
You can always manager flash Player update settings by opening “ Control Panel” from there by opening “Flash Player Settings Manager” and further select “Advanced” tab and choose the desired option under “Updates”.
