Enable Adobe Flash Player toggle in Safari. How to push/force after update?

[natejosiah]

For a while now, after we update Flash to the latest version the Adobe Flash Player Plug-in toggle stays unchecked, even though we are using the latest version.

Last year I never had to deal with this toggle. Is this something new? Is there some time gate that if its not updated in a certain amount of time it won't re-toggle automatically after being updated?

I'm not sure how long this has been happening. Maybe a good 6 weeks. I just set up Autopkgr and am trying to get as much of this automated as possible.

I have tried capturing plists with Composer a couple different ways with no success at deployment.

Environment is almost all 10.10.* iMacs. Casper Suite at 9.92. Let me know if I've blanked on any important info for the issue.

Thanks for reading,
Nate

[mikeh]

You are possibly seeing something new, I'm guessing.

In the past, with Safari 9 and below, if Flash was disabled because XProtect started blocking it, updating Flash to the current version was enough to re-enable it.

Now, if you've recently updated your computers to Safari 10, Flash Player is turned off for all websites by default. Even if you do manage to turn it back on (which I don't know how to do), the user has to enable it for each web site that requests access to the plugin.

I imagine in the next couple days somebody will have something that reenables Flash for each user.

[bvrooman]

Yep, that threw some of our users for a loop.

Here's what I added to com.apple.Safari through a user-level config profile:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>ManagedPlugInPolicies</key>
    <dict>
        <key>com.macromedia.Flash Player.plugin</key>
        <dict>
            <key>PlugInDisallowPromptBeforeUseDialog</key>
            <true/>
            <key>PlugInFirstVisitPolicy</key>
            <string>PlugInPolicyAllowWithSecurityRestrictions</string>
    </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

The downside is that this only takes effect on newly-accessed sites that use Flash. Anyone who has attempted to access a particular Flash-using site will need to enable it for that site in Safari preferences -> Security -> Plug-in Settings -> Adobe Flash Player. I know there are some keys that can be added for individual sites if it needs to be mass-enabled for a few known domains, but I haven't had time to experiment with those settings very much.

[pcrandom]

Does this config profile actually enable the Flash plug-in if it's originally unchecked in the list of plug-ins? I'm still new to constructing configuration profiles, but I've been tracking the changes that happen in com.apple.Safari.plist when I make changes in the GUI, and it seems that whether a plug-in is checked in the first place is the plugInCurrentState key true/false.

You can enable per-domain by using the PlugInHostnamePolicies key. See here.