If you want to be secure on the Web, it’s best that you keep all your extensions upgraded. Flash Player is no exception as its does occasionally fall to zero day attacks and other exploits. While continuously upgrading to the latest version is the best course of action, that’s not exactly feasible in an enterprise environment. That’s where Flash Player extend support comes in.

Adobe announced on Wednesday that Flash Player extended support will be upgrading from version 11.7 to version 13 on May 13. On that day, enterprise and IT customers who use extended support releases will find version 13 on Adobe’s distribution channel.

So, what’s the benefit of using the extended support release? Instead of having to adapt to new features with every new release, extended support versions of Flash Player don’t include any new features of bug fixes. These releases focus exclusively on security fixes so enterprise customers can ensure all the computers on their network stay secure without having to introduce new features every few weeks.

Of course, enterprise and IT managers will want to start testing Flash Player 13 now before rolling it out to everybody to ensure everything works. For that, Adobe offers a Flash Player 13 beta on their Web site. You can grab it here.

As an aside, it should be noted that the extended support release of Flash Player has finally moved to the new numbering scheme Adobe adopted back in November of last year. No more will Adobe use minor numbers, like 11.x, when referring to updates as each updated version of Flash Player will now have a nice whole number for every update. In other words, Flash Player 13 will become Flash Player 14 instead of something like 13.2.

Image via Adobe