Flash Player 10.1 to Support InPrivate Browsing

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 12 Feb 2010

The upcoming 10.1 version of Adobe’s Flash Player will feature support for Internet Explorer’s InPrivate Browsing feature. InPrivate browsing in IE is the equivalent of Private Browsing in Mozilla’s Firefox or Incognito in Google’s Chrome browser. Basically, it is a feature that allows you to browse the web safe in the knowledge that IE will not store any details about your browsing session.

There is a catch though. While InPrivate Browsing is turned on, IE will not remember things like search history, download history, web form history, cookies, or temporary internet files. But if you browse to a page with Flash – and pretty much all sites out there have Flash – the browser will store Flash cookies. Storing these cookies goes against the InPrivate Browsing principle. I mean, IE does not store regular cookies, but it does store Flash cookies.

The upcoming Flash Player 10.1 will support InPrivate Browsing and will not store Flash cookies. Program Manager with IE, Andy Zeigler, explains:

“Recently, Adobe announced that their latest version of Flash supports InPrivate Browsing. Version 10.1 of Flash will now respond to interfaces we built into IE8 when we first released it. When you browse to a site with Flash, it can store “Flash Cookies”, which are files created by Flash that websites can use to store data. Now, just like your IE history and cookies, these Flash objects will be deleted when you close your InPrivate Browsing window. We’re really happy to see Flash adopt our InPrivate Browsing feature, and happy to see that they’ve also supported private browsing in Firefox and Chrome as well. Great job Flash team!”

There is something else that Flash Player 10.1 will do. The Mac version will be faster, it will finally be as fast as the Windows version. Despite using basically the same code on both platforms, Flash Player was traditionally faster on Windows compared to the Mac OS X. Adobe announced it is working with Apple to ensure Flash Player 10.1 is just as fast on both platforms.

Adobe also announced that with Flash Player 10.1 it will patch a bug that causes the software to crash – an all platforms. The funny thing is that Adobe knew about this bug for 16 months, but somehow forgot to address it. Read more about it here.


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