Flash Player installer blocked by Safari - but Safari is not running

[macandrew]

Running the Flash Player v17 installer - it stops and tells me to quit Safari.

Only problem is: Safari is not running.

And if that wasn't enough, the link on the Support page for installing Flash on Mac links to the Windows support page.

[_maria_]

Hi,

Please ensure you quit out of Safari, closing the browser window still leaves the application running.  Please see How do I quit Safari (or another browser/app) in OS X

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Maria

[macandrew]

??? What do you think the phrase, "Safari is not running" means?

[_maria_]

Hi macandrew,

Many people come here saying "Safari is not running" when in fact Safari is running because they've only closed the browser and don't actually quit out of Safari.  The previous response usually answers their question.  There's a possibility that some other process is being identified to the installer as being a Safari process.  You can either launch Activity Monitor and look for such a process If it's running, terminate it, or restart your machine ensuring no apps that may use Flash Player are started automatically upon log on and install Flash Player.  This ensures nothing is running that will interfere with the installation.

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Maria

[lucyp4401830]

But when I quit Safari, I also lost the instructions I was trying to follow.  On my older Mac, I didn't have to quit Safari to install the update.  I did that this morning with no trouble at all!  Once I quit Safari, I had to come back through it in order to have anything work at all.

[_maria_]

Hello,

At this time, Flash Player requires all apps/processes that are using it to be closed for the installation to complete.  We are working on changing this to remove this requirement.  At this time I don't have an estimate as to when this will be implemented.

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maria

[jesta777]

Hi macandrew,

For info, I hd the same problem. Using activity monitor I noticed that Flash was running as an add-in to a Facebook app I have running. Killing that Flash process enabled the install to run successfully to completion. (YMMV).

Looks like it is safari running Flash that blocks the install, not safari itself. Would be useful if the whole answer was given, good luck.