Adobe Issues Flash Player Fix for IE9 Users Experiencing Issues

Last week Adobe broke the Internet. What they did was push an upgrade to their Flash plugin to version 10.3 that made it impossible to view and consume Flash content for Windows 7 + IE9 + Intel HD Graphics users!

This affected ~80% of the computers at Microsoft New Zealand.

See the screenshots below for what the NZ Herald site looked like for people after they upgraded Flash.

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If you have been affected and you are wondering how to fix it you have two choices.

  1. Roll back to a 10.2 version of Flash
  2. Install the pre-release fix from Adobe.

Adobe have admitted that they are at fault:

As there are many configurations and driver combinations that we don’t have in our testing lab, your feedback is important to ensure we have a good resolution.

But the part I don’t get is how a common configuration that encompasses hundreds of millions of machines worldwide isn’t in Adobe’s testing lab!

Unfortunately many users have been left clueless as to what is going wrong.

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Update: I have received multiple reports that the pre-release fix Adobe issued doesn’t work.

I recommend un-installing Flash and installing

(Released 4/15/2011) Flash Player 10.2.159.1 (66.3 MB)

at least until Adobe sort themselves out. Let them know if the fix isn’t working for you here.

Update 2: Yesterday Adobe released 10.3.181.16 try this to see if it fixes the problem.

(Released 5/31/2011) Flash Player 10.3.181.16 (6.3 MB)

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