Mike Tomlinson wrote:

Jo-Anne:

What I did recently was set Flash in Firefox to ask to activate.

Very sensible, absolutely the right thing to given the enormous number
of bugs, vulnerabilities and security concerns that have been found, and
are still being found, in it despite Adobe having had more than 20 years
to fix it.

There have recently been calls for Flash to be killed off altogether,
and momentum is growing, so hopefully before not too long you'll be able
to uninstall it and it can be consigned to the cesspit of history along
with Silverlight.

http://www.cvedetails.com/product/67...l?vendor_id=53
511 vulnerabilities

Note that some also include vulnerabilities in Adobe Air, Adobe's
library they include with their products, like Adobe Reader.

http://www.cvedetails.com/product/11...l?vendor_id=53
199 vulnerabilities

You should get rid of Adobe Air, too. That means getting rid of Adobe
products that rely on Adobe Air (so replace Adobe Reader with a
different PDF viewer, like PDFxchange Viewer).

Those lists are a total count of vulnerabilities over time, not only the
current ones where the vulnerabilities still exist. Those lists do not
have an option to search on only Open status vulnerabilities (to
eliminate the Closed status ones).

For Silverlight:
http://www.cvedetails.com/product/19...l?vendor_id=26

Silverlight is much newer, is more secure and robust than Flash, but
it's a typical too-late response by Microsoft to long-time existing
competition in a field where Microsoft finally decides to participate.
There is little use of Silverlight. Unless you actually have a site
that you require is fully functional (i.e., you must have Silverlight to
see all content rather than only some of it at the site) or use an
critical application that demands the use of Silverlight then don't
bother with Silverlight. Of course, disabling the add-on in the web
browser does not stop a different application from using Silverlight, so
you could leave Silverlight installed for the other application but not
bother with Silverlight in your web browser.

From your responses, doesn't look like you need Silverlight at all.

Of course, Microsoft isn't clean, either. For just Windows 7, see:

http://www.cvedetails.com/product/17...l?vendor_id=26