[BLOG] Ditch QuickTime on Windows - Apple Drop Support for Vulnerable Plugin

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CrimsonShade
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[BLOG] Ditch QuickTime on Windows - Apple Drop Support for Vulnerable Plugin

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Apple are dropping support for Quicktime, a plugin for viewing and streaming video, on Windows on account of no longer being useful.



The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has confirmed it'll no longer update or support Quicktime 7 for Windows.



Way back when, QuickTime was a requirement to run iTunes, as the Quicktime code was used in part to provide the music streaming capabilities of the software, which resulted in many people who had iPods - and later, the iPhone - installing the plugin to their Windows PCs when they wanted them to properly work with their computers. As Apple notes on its support page, however, this situation changed in later versions of iTunes, and Quicktime has not been a requirement to run iTunes since October 2011.



Despite not being relevant for iTunes any more, Quicktime continued to be useful to serve up video on the web. However, with HTML5 encouraging browsers to support video directly as part of the standard language of the internet, having a separate plugin for the ability now appears redundant. The combination of these two factors appears to have encouraged Apple to have made the decision to no longer support the plugin on Windows.



The announcement comes a week after the Department of Homeland Security recommended Windows users uninstall Quicktime because of potential security holes, making Quicktime potentially vulnerable and use of it on Windows PCs a major security risk (these flaws do not affect the Mac OS version, which remains in support). Given its status as a potential security threat and the lack of any updates coming from Apple, many sources now recommend that Quicktime is removed from all Windows PCs as soon as possible.



For those who are unsure how to, Apple's official support pages offer a guide for how to remove Quicktime from Windows PCs. Apple have been reached for comment to confirm the Wall Street Journal's report.



This article originally appeared at Technically Motivated
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