TechNote

Flash Player 9 for Unsupported Operating Systems

Issue

Starting with the Adobe Flash Player 10 release, new versions of Flash Player are no longer available for Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows ME, Macintosh OSX 10.1-10.3, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4 operating systems. This is due to enhancements and features added in Flash Player 10 that cannot be supported on older operating systems.

Reason

The features added to Flash Player use the technology in the latest operating systems for performance, functionality, and efficiency. These subsystems are not included in the older operating systems. Additionally, manufacturers will no longer fix issues in these operating systems, which makes it impossible to address Flash Player issues with root causes in the operating system.

Solution

We realize that, in some cases, there is not only a desire but a necessity to run Flash Player on an unsupported machine. In this situation, we recommend installing the latest Flash Player available for your operating system (9.0.159.0 for Windows, Macintosh and Linux) to take advantage of the most recent security and stability updates to Flash Player 9.

Adobe recommends that all Flash Player users on supported systems update to the most recent version of the player through the Flash Player Download Center.