Adobe knocks Apple for serving up outdated Flash Player

Computerworld - Apple on Tuesday patched 28 vulnerabilities in is Snow Leopard operating system, including two in Adobe's Flash Player.

But in another example of the tension between the two companies -- sparked by Apple CEO Steve Jobs' rejection of Flash as slow, buggy and obsolete -- Adobe immediately countered by noting that Apple's Flash fixes were already outdated.

"10.6.4 update for Mac OS X includes Flash Player, but not the latest version," said Brad Arkin, Adobe's director of security and privacy, in a message on Twitter Tuesday shortly after Apple issued the security and performance update.

Others at Adobe chimed in yesterday that Apple shipped the outdated Flash Player 10.0.45.2 with Mac OS X 10.6.4, and like Arkin, urged Mac users to download a newer edition directly from Adobe's site.

Adobe patched a pair of bugs in Flash Player 10.0.45.2 for Mac and Windows in February 2010.

The newest edition of the popular media player is 10.1.53.64, a 32-patch update Adobe shipped June 10, in part to fix a zero-day flaw that hackers have been exploiting since earlier this month.

It's not unusual for Apple to lag behind Adobe in releasing Flash Player patches to its users. Apple, unlike Microsoft, handles the distribution of Flash Player updates for its users, bundling them into its OS updates.

This was only the second time that Adobe has called out Apple over including an outdated version of Flash Player with Mac OS X, according to reviews of Adobe's security blog.

The first time was last September, when Adobe noted that Apple had shipped an older, vulnerable edition of Flash Player with Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, when that OS debuted in August 2009. Security researchers took Apple to task for bundling an old version of Adobe's software with Snow Leopard, and for "downgrading" newer editions to the outdated software.

Apple refreshed Snow Leopard two weeks later to include a then-up-to-date copy of Flash.