Installing previous version of flash player

Question

Up front:
I know - I know - I am in the wrong group/forum.
But
a) when posting earlier I got something of a not authorized error
b) when searching for a flash player forum, most were greyed out
c) my endless searches for a forum admin regretfully remained in vain
As my last restort I am posting here...
I have resp. want...:
1. uninstalled Flash Player as outlined on http://forums.adobe.com/message/4041846
(How do I do a clean install of Flash Player?)
2. IE11 x64 and Firefox on my Windows 7 x64
3. downloaded/extracted fp_10.3.183.20_archive.zip and found below files suitable for installation
flashplayer10_3r183_20_win_sa.exe
flashplayer10_3r183_20_win.exe
flashplayer10_3r183_20_winax.exe
4. installed flashplayer10_3r183_20_win.exe, but for IE this was not suitable
5. installed flashplayer10_3r183_20_winax.exe but IE still asked for Flash Player to be installed
For some reason (long story) I need an old version suitable for FF and IE to be installed.
Q: how am I to proceed ??
i.e. what files no I need for these two browsers?
Thanks
==

Answer 1

Hi,
The implementations of Flash Player in Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox (and even Firefox between WinXP and Win7) are all significantly different software. 
In the face of the modern security threat landscape, one of the security-in-depth measures we've taken is an approach called sandboxing, which attempts to isolate the Flash Player processes that deal with untrusted content, and handles that content while operating with the least privileges possible.  This way if a potential exploit does slip through our defenses and our process ends up under the control of malicious code, that code lacks the permission to do anything interesting.  A more technical explanation of the approach can be found here: http://blogs.adobe.com/asset/2012/06/inside-flash-player-protected-mode-for-firefox.html
All of this additional processing and communication comes at a cost, and the sandboxing approaches in Chrome, IE and Firefox are significantly different.  Modern Chrome and IE browsers impose sandboxing on plug-ins at an architectural level, while we've retrofitted a sandboxing approach to Firefox. 
A retrofitted approach is necessarily less efficient, and you're seeing a bottleneck there as we pass each downloaded packet through multiple processes in order to achieve the necessary level of isolation.  We've already tuned this significantly.  I think you would see a performance jump in Firefox if you went back to Flash Player 10, because you would have a version that pre-dates protected mode.
Long story short, diagnosing network problems using Flash is probably not the best approach.
The bandwidth measurement tool is downloading data through Flash because it makes it easy to write a pretty user interface.  This is probably not representative of most of the things you're downloading, aside from streaming video.
The version of Flash installed isn't going to affect a typical file download in the browser, or your BitTorrent throughput.
Having one sample for each browser isn't enough to draw any meaningful conclusions.  There are too many possible factors that could affect throughput to allow you to use a small sample.  This data is going to be very noisy.   At minimum, you'd want dozens of samples at various time periods for each target.
There are excellent, purpose-built network diagnostic tools available for conducting a meaningful analysis.
With respect to the confusion about what asset to install:
Our archived versions are intended for use by Flash developers with an understanding of the technology.  All of these versions have known security vulnerabilities, and we absolutely do not recommend them for general web browsing.  You should always run the current version of Flash Player.
Internet Explorer uses ActiveX controls for plug-ins.  Most other browsers use the Netscape Plug-In API (NPAPI Plug-In).  Chrome and Chromium-based browsers use a more modern PPAPI (Pepper Plug-in API Architecture).
So for Internet Explorer, you want the flashplayer10_3r183_20_winax.exe (win = Windows, ax = ActiveX) installer.
When a website presents you with an "Install Flash" message, that message is generated by JavaScript on the page.  Sometimes that JavaScript makes bad assumptions (like Internet Explorer or Flash versions will be single-digits) or they require a minimum version of Flash because they're dependent on Features in those versions, or want to encourage you to be secure.
Hope that helps!