The move let Chrome beat rival browsers to the punch: Users of Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox, Safari and Opera won't receive a Flash update from Adobe until next week.

On Monday, Adobe announced that an unpatched, or "zero-day," vulnerability in Flash Player using malicious Microsoft Excel documents attached to e-mail messages. Adobe said it would patch Flash Player for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux sometime next week, but did not put a date on the calendar.

Yesterday, Google pushed a Chrome update to users running the stable and beta builds of the browser.

"This release contains an updated version of the Adobe Flash player," Jason Kersey, a Chrome program manager, said in a to a Google blog.

After updating Chrome to version 10.0.648.134, the browser reports that it's running Flash Player 10.2.154.25, a step up from the 10.2.154.18 bundled with the last update of the browser.