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Mozilla To Enable Click-To-Play For All Firefox Plugins By Default

Posted by timothy on from the choose-your-own-adventure dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla on Tuesday announced a massive change to the way it loads third-party plugins in Firefox. The company plans to enable Click to Play for all versions of all plugins, except the latest release of Flash. This essentially means Firefox will soon only load third-party plugins when users click to interact with the plugin. Currently, Firefox automatically loads any plugin requested by a website, unless Mozilla has blocked it for security reasons (such as for old versions of Java, Silverlight, and Flash)."

26 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Need for speed! by sandytaru · · Score: 2, Informative

    Hopefully this speeds up Firefox considerably. I stopped using it because it was so much slower than Chrome at some basic tasks. But considering Chrome is incredibly unstable on Windows 8, I'm willing to give Firefox another chance.

    --
    Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
    1. Re:Need for speed! by Synerg1y · · Score: 2

      Such a simple solution, they already have plugin detection, so they probably just expanded that with an on / off switch. And... nobodies thought of it, I like it, mozilla needs some fresh new features... I still can't get sync to work easily for what I want it to (multiple computers, 1 bookmarks file, idc about mobile devices for those). I'm willing to bet the next versions of chrome and IE will include it though.

    2. Re:Need for speed! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      I stopped using it because it was so much slower than Chrome at some basic tasks

      Are you a "high speed" trader?

      What real useful difference does it make? Seriously?

      Step 1: Crippling addiction to absorbing information from the internet at all times.
      Step 2: Run out of information to absorb from familiar places.
      Step 3: Boredom.
      Step 4: Find new place from which information can be absorbed. That new place discusses application speed and responsiveness with nanosecond resolution.
      Step 5: Absorbed information must be used! Develop brand new crippling addiction of obsessing over browser speed.
      Step 6: ???
      Step 7: Gain attention by complaining on public forums! Which is a form of profit.

    3. Re:Need for speed! by asavage · · Score: 4, Informative

      Chrome uses a massive amount of RAM. About 3x more than Firefox. It is good if you have a lot of RAM but can even run poorly on 8 GB systems, such as if you have virtual memory disabled because of a SSD. I switched back to Firefox because of this.

    4. Re:Need for speed! by Dragonslicer · · Score: 2

      And... nobodies thought of i.

      ..except Chrome already does this.

      So does the FlashBlock extension.

    5. Re:Need for speed! by jonadab · · Score: 2

      > Hopefully this speeds up Firefox considerably.

      You know what speeds up Firefox considerably?

      Noscript.

      It's amazing. I expected it to make some difference, but it had MUCH more impact than I imagined possible. Apparently about 99.8% of page "load" time is actually not spent loading page content, but executing completely gratuitous client-side scripts, most of which you never even realized were there, because they don't do anything the user would ever notice much less care about.

      Occasionally you will run into a site that actually doesn't work correctly with Javascript disabled, but this is the exception rather than the rule, and you can always tell NoScript to allow them on a case-by-case basis. *Most* of the javascript on the web, as near as I can tell, exists _purely_ for the purpose of increasing page load times. My tabset of pages that I load every morning before breakfast (including comics and some news sites) went from taking more than ten wallclock minutes to load down to more like five seconds with NoScript, and not a single one of those pages is missing any worthwhile content or meaningful functionality as a result, so near as I can tell.

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
  2. Please include flash! by Torp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Subject says it all... why enable flash by default? Even if it didn't have any security holes, it's still the great battery eater...

    --
    I apologize for the lack of a signature.
    1. Re:Please include flash! by Torp · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Maybe you... i browse with FlashBlock on all machines, portable or not. If I want to watch a movie I'll click to enable just the movie, thank you.

      --
      I apologize for the lack of a signature.
    2. Re:Please include flash! by pushing-robot · · Score: 2

      Quite a few pages have hidden flash elements that are vital to the operation of the page. Most web music players, for instance. Blocking flash by default would break quite a few sites.

      Software developers—and browser makers in particular—have to weigh security against user experience.

      --
      How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
    3. Re:Please include flash! by Secret+Agent+Man · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Which is why Chrome's Click to Play also puts a puzzle piece in your address bar, which you can click to run all plugins on a page once or all the time for a given domain. Does Firefox do something similar? There are lots of cases where there's no clickable space to enable a third party plugin.

    4. Re:Please include flash! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      90% of auto-starting flash is adverts. For the few things that are actually useful content, it isn't much extra effort to click. I was amazed at how much my browsing experience improved when I installed a click-to-play plugin for Flash.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    5. Re:Please include flash! by Cajun+Hell · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Most web music players, for instance. Blocking flash by default would break quite a few sites.

      Some peoples' "broken" sites are other peoples' "fixed" sites.

      --
      "Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
    6. Re:Please include flash! by Lucky75 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I don't understand how people keep getting their extensions broken by firefox updates? If they're written properly, they don't break with updates anymore.

      --
      DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
    7. Re:Please include flash! by jorgevillalobos · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yes, Firefox Click-to-Play has the same feature.

    8. Re:Please include flash! by Merk42 · · Score: 2

      So you're suggesting Firefox doesn't follow the W3C/Whatwg standard?

      I'm sure if it were spun as "iOS refuses to follow standards for <video> tag" you'd be up in arms.

    9. Re:Please include flash! by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 2

      Once I switched to a YouTube downloader for FF ( "Easy YouTube Video Downloader" https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/easy-youtube-video-downl-10137/ ) there is almost zero reason to even have flash installed anymore except for the odd Web Game. i.e. These 2 have excellent gameplay:

      Gemcraft - Chapter 0
      http://armorgames.com/play/3527/gemcraft-chapter-0

      Desktop Tower Defense
      http://www.kongregate.com/games/preecep/desktop-tower-defense-1-5

  3. So why the hell does Flash get a pass? by idontgno · · Score: 5, Informative

    I found it Reading the Fucking Article:

    Going forward, Mozilla will essentially be blocking all plugins except the very latest version of Flash. The company won't say why it is exempting Adobe's plugin, but it's most likely because users expect their videos to play automatically (and advertisers expect their ads to load automatically).

    Emphasis mine.

    "Follow the money." That's a reason I can understand.

    Makes me glad I usually run with Adblock and NoScript.

    --
    Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
    1. Re:So why the hell does Flash get a pass? by MozeeToby · · Score: 2

      Going forward, Mozilla will essentially be blocking all plugins except the very latest version of Flash. The company won't say why it is exempting Adobe's plugin, but it's most likely because users expect their videos to play automatically (and advertisers expect their ads to load automatically).

      Emphasis mine.

      FFS, you're bolding and ranting like that's the word from Mozilla when what you are quoting is uninformed speculation from the author of the article (though it very well may be true). I suspect the average user being confronted with what is, to them, an error message when they go to youtube.com (or any number of other flash reliant sites) might have some bearing in the decision.

    2. Re:So why the hell does Flash get a pass? by Johann+Lau · · Score: 2

      I completely uninstalled Flash along with Java about a week ago, and haven't looked back since. Whenever something doesn't work without flash, as cool it as may be, I can *always* answer the question with "do I need this, as opposed to just wanting it?" with a resounding no... your mileage may vary, but I dare doubt it does :P http://www.youtube.com/html5 is working better and better for me, too.

  4. I predict chaos by Phoenix+Rising · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While we as technical users might enjoy a plugin-free experience with no extra clicking involved, the average Joe User is going to be pissed off.

    I run with NoScript - does pretty much what Mozilla wants to do (plus script blocking), except without the big gray box. The average user is not interested in NoScript type functionality - they want a rich web experience out of the box, and if that includes Flash, PDF files, and audio, then that's what they want.

    I suspect the reason Flash is turned on isn't because of ads - it's because there are a number of high profile corporate websites out there that become unusable if Flash isn't enabled.

    --
    Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry -- Mark Twain
    1. Re:I predict chaos by Dragonslicer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      While we as technical users might enjoy a plugin-free experience with no extra clicking involved, the average Joe User is going to be pissed off.

      I know this can be a dangerous idea, but I think you may be underestimating the average user. I suspect the conversation will go something like this:

      Average User: Hey, why doesn't the video play automatically anymore?
      Other Person: You have to click the big Play button first.
      Average User: Oh, okay.

      The average user probably won't ever understand why they have to do it, nor will they care, but they'll be able to repeat the necessary step(s).

  5. plugin-container contained? by empties · · Score: 3, Funny

    What will I do with the excess memory if plugin-container.exe doesn't get out of hand anymore? Or perhaps we'll see a new big process: plugin-container-container

  6. Poor misfigured HTML, hateful and hated all around by VortexCortex · · Score: 2

    The features tacked onto HTML5 like <audio> and <script> aren't considered a plugin, thus writing your animation w/ sound in it would seem to bypass the new default click-to-play. Ah, but it doesn't matter anyway since they're not making Flash click-to-play. So either this will make annoying BS more difficult to block without breaking the site, or it stengthens Flash in opposition to HTML5. Now browsers will be even less usable without NoScript and AdBlock.

    Either way you look at it HTML5 is dead to me; It's been 13 years (half the age of the Web) and we're still stuck on HTML 4.01... Time to give up folks, HTML6 won't arrive before the Singularity. The Web even tanks as a cross platform dev platform -- I can make pixel perfect feature rich cross-platform native application for Linux, Win, BSD, OSX, Android, iOS in 1/3rd the time it takes me to ensure the same "web app" works in all the browsers and OSs. It was a bad idea to begin with -- Hack together the most inefficient scripting language and a stateless static document display engine to create stateful internet enabled applications (Every damn site is a stateful application now). HTML is ugly, and pointless. Long live the Internet, but Fuck The Web.

  7. Don't see the difference by sjbe · · Score: 4, Informative

    Chrome is really fast. It does stand out when you use it, even if I prefer to use Firefox.

    I use both daily and frankly can't really see any speed difference for anything I need to do. While there probably are some differences I'm usually more limited by the speed of my connection to the ISP than anything else.

  8. Re:Poor misfigured HTML, hateful and hated all aro by Corporate+T00l · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can make pixel perfect feature rich cross-platform native application for Linux, Win, BSD, OSX, Android, iOS in 1/3rd the time it takes me to ensure the same "web app" works in all the browsers and OSs.

    I want whatever development tool chain you're using. Just dealing with the different installer mechanisms on those platforms makes my head spin. What's your secret?

  9. Strange how things turn out by Chuck+Chunder · · Score: 2

    Remember back when the EOLAS patent was being waved about and it was suggested that browser makers may have to implement "click to play" to avoid it.

    Strange that a year after EOLAS gets their arse handed to them in a Texas court we get to a similar place for entirely different reasons.

    --
    Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park