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The Global Settings Panel must die

Posted: 17/12/09

An image of The Global Settings Panel must die

After recent exchanges with Seb Lee-Delisle and Jesse Freeman it became clear that I'm not the only one who dislikes the current method for managing your security and privacy settings in the Flash Player.

If you've ever used the Flash Player Global Settings Panel, like me you've probably wondered "why do I have to go to this Macromedia website to change the security and privacy settings on my local Adobe Flash Player installation?" Perhaps once upon a time there was a legitimate reason for doing this, but in the era of AIR 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1 I struggle to see how that could still be the case.

If you're not sure whether you've seen it before, here's a screenshot:

Let's be honest here, it's silly. I have a piece of software running on my machine, yet to change the settings I have to go to the manufacturer's website? As a user, if I want to delete my local shared objects (Flash cookies) I right-click the SWF, click "Settings..." and then Advanced... The Flash Player then spawns a new browser window and sends me to The settings manager page I then have to go to the Website Storage Settings panel to remove the shared objects. When I want to delete my cookies from Firefox, I don't have to visit the Mozilla website to do it. If I want to change my page layout in Word from portrait to landscape, I'm not compelled to visit microsoft.com.

As I said, someone somewhere may have had a valid reason for doing it this way (player footprint?), but is that still the case? I'd like to ask the Flash Player team if they can review the appropriateness of the Global Settings Panel, and document the conclusion they arrive at, so the development community can better understand.

At the very least, I don't think it is at all appropriate to continue hosting this on the Macromedia domain name. Macromedia Flash Player is dead, Adobe Flash Player is the program that users have a relationship with, and all URLs should reflect that; particularly one relating to security settings (!!)

GET INVOLVED WITH FP-783: As users and developers alike we can put some weight behind an already deep-seated desire to get this changed. There's a bug raised on the JIRA that I hope you will add your vote to, and hopefully lead to it getting adopted by the Flash Player team as a feature.

Vote now for FP-783 - a new way of a managing Flash Player settings

Keywords for this post: flash player, security, settings panel, macromedia, adobe, feature