Adobe Flash Player patch question - difference between ActiveX & Plugin; MSI & EXE?

I'm attempting to publish the latest version of Adobe Flash Player to my environment. I had two questions:

1. What is the difference between Adobe Flash Player Plugin and Adobe Flash Player ActiveX? When would each be needed?

2. What is the difference between the EXE version and the MSI version? When would each be needed?

We typically have users only running Internet Explorer and Flash Player is only needed while browsing from Internet Explorer. I'm guessing I would only need to publish the ActiveX version, but am not sure about why I would choose EXE or MSI.

Thanks!
Jim

Find more posts tagged with

Accepted answers

All comments

frgpugs

There are technically three flash packages.

ActiveX

NPAPI (Plugin)

APAPI

It gets a little confusing because there used to only be 2, the one for IE which is the ActiveX and the "plugin"(NPAPI) version which is for other browsers. There is also now an APAPI version which Solarwinds does not give out packages for that I believe is for Opera browser but I could be wrong I just know I dont use it.

So then you have the choice of exe or MSI. Typically you will always want the MSI. Windows installer uses msi files and an exe is just a package that contains one or more msi files and could contain other files to be installed. MSI files are typically easier to uninstall since you dont have any bloated software or unknown registry changes to worry about removing and MSI directly supports certain commands from a command line.