I remember a point where just about every time anyone logged into a XP machine, the Flash player would start begging to be updated. There seemed to be multiple updates a week sometimes to fix stuff. When Chrome started embedding Flash it was just about revolutionary since you didn’t have to keep as much of an eye on whatever CVE popped up that day.
Also, the whole auto-update story is a bit of a tangent anyhow - nothing updated reliably back then. People were lazy, or didn't trust updates; but it was common for people to delay updates sometimes indefinitely, even if in the long-term that was unwise. That may have been one of chromes big selling points; that meant that you knew what you were targeting back when FF and especially, especially IE always required coding for 5 or so major versions - you'd have IE compat mode (~5.5), 6,7,8, and sometimes IE9 or mac-IE, which all had pretty significant feature and bug differences, and it took years to obsolete a version. And ironically, IE's fractured nature kept the web alive; because it meant that you needed to invest in the kinds of processes, habits, and webdesign that catered to multiple rendering engines. IE's dominance appears huge only if you add all those versions together; but from a webdevs perspective, you needed to do many of the things cross-browser support requires anyhow - unlike today, when you can get pretty far by simply testing on chrome only, and likely iOS (though even that is ignorable for some quite influential market segments, e.g. india, and it risks obsoletion in china and africa too).
I remember a point where just about every time anyone logged into a XP machine, the Flash player would start begging to be updated. There seemed to be multiple updates a week sometimes to fix stuff. When Chrome started embedding Flash it was just about revolutionary since you didn’t have to keep as much of an eye on whatever CVE popped up that day.