Firefox 17 Launches With Click-to-Play Plugin Blocks

An anonymous reader writes "As expected, Mozilla on Tuesday officially launched Firefox 17 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The biggest addition in this release is click-to-play plugins, announced back in October. In short, the addition means Mozilla will now prompt Firefox users on Windows with old versions of Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Silverlight (more will be added eventually)." The release notes are available, as is a list of changes for devs. Firefox for Android got a new release as well (notes).

Comments

ClickToPlay sounded good; then I read the summary.

[jonadab]

When I read the headline, "Click-to-Play Plugin Blocks", I was thinking that plugin content would be blocked from doing anything unless the user clicks a play button. Just like FlashBlock, in other words. That would actually be a good thing. A good change, in a new version of Firefox: I might've fainted.

But no, what it actually means is this:
> Mozilla will now prompt Firefox users on Windows with old versions of Adobe Reader...

Oh, yes, please.

We need this because Adobe Reader doesn't already prompt every single user who has it installed to the effect that they need to upgrade it, a bare minimum of three per hour. We definitely need our web browser to bug us about this also, otherwise we might not know that three new versions of Adobe Reader were released during the time it took us to download and install the version we currently have. Well, I mean, okay, in theory we'd _know_, but without this extra reminder we might occasionally go up to fifteen minutes at a time without _thinking_ about it. Mozilla must protect us from that horrific fate.