See a “Flash Out-of-Date” Message in Safari on Mac? Here’s How to Fix That

Mac users who primarily browse the web with Safari will eventually notice the “Flash out-of-date” message appearing somewhere in the browser. This happens because the Mac will intentionally disable the Flash player plugin when it has become outdated, preventing any potential security breaches from occurring. As you probably guessed, this just means you need to update the Adobe Flash Player plugin to the latest version, but many users have done just that (or think they have) and still find the “Flash out-of-date” message appearing all over Safari and around the web. That’s what we’re aiming to address here, properly installing the latest version of Flash to get the plugin working again in Safari and to resolve that error message.

Note: this is limited to Safari for Mac OS X only, and does not apply to Google Chrome users. Chrome uses a bundled version of Flash player that is sandboxed and automatically updates along with Chrome itself.

To get rid of the “Flash out-of-date” message in Safari, do the following

1. Click on the “Flash out-of-date” text, typically visible in a box in Safari where a video or advertisement may appear



2. This will summon an alert indicating “Adobe Flash Player is out of date”, be sure to choose ‘Download Flash’



3. This will redirect you to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ or you can visit the Adobe site manually – Important: only download Flash from the official Adobe website to get the latest version
4. Uncheck the “Optional offer” otherwise you’ll wind up getting some unwanted software along with Flash Player – why does Adobe do this? Who knows
5. Choose the “Install Now” button to launch to start the download and installation process



6. Follow through with the installer, when the latest version of Flash has finished updating and installing, quit out of Safari
7. Relaunch Safari for the newest version of the plugin to load effectively, the ‘Flash out of date’ message should now be gone

Easy enough, right? It is, but many users go wrong in this process. The most common error I’ve seen is because when users click the ‘Flash out of date’ button, they see the pop-up message and then simply click on the “OK” button at that alert, a normal response to dismiss a popup dialog in Mac OS X. And that’s the problem, because users must click specifically to download Flash or update the plugin manually themselves, both followed by a relaunch of the Safari browser app, to resolve the message in Safari, otherwise it will continue to appear, putting them into a seemingly endless loop of updates that never happen.

Two important notes: if you have selectively blocked or enabled Flash for particular websites you may need to adjust that list in order for Flash to load as intended, similarly if you use a plugin like ClickToFlash in Safari you may want to disable that temporarily beforehand while you update Flash. And obviously if you uninstalled it that is going to become undone by this process, so be mindful of that if you had a compelling reason to remove the plugin from Safari to begin with.

It’s also important to point out this is not a permanent solution because Adobe Flash Player continuously gets updated, thus the older version of the plugin will continuously become disabled by OS X as a security precaution. That means you’ll have to update the Flash plugin manually every time you see that message, then relaunch Safari. If you don’t want to deal with that, using an alternate browser like Google Chrome is another solution, though Chrome itself automatically updates itself too.

Thanks to Deidre for the question and tip idea! Do you have any tips, tricks, or questions for us? Send us an email, hit us up on twitter, facebook, Google+, or post a comment!