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

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)."

Comments

Please include flash!

[Torp]

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...

Re:Please include flash!

[Torp]

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.

Re:Please include flash!

[Secret Agent Man]

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.

Re:Please include flash!

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Please include flash!

[Cajun Hell]

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.

Re:Please include flash!

[Lucky75]

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.

Re:Please include flash!

[jorgevillalobos]

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

So why the hell does Flash get a pass?

[idontgno]

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.

I predict chaos

[Phoenix Rising]

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.

Re:I predict chaos

[Dragonslicer]

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).

plugin-container contained?

[empties]

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

Re:Need for speed!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Don't see the difference

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Need for speed!

[asavage]

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.

Re:Poor misfigured HTML, hateful and hated all aro

[Corporate T00l]

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?