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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)."

4 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. 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...

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  2. 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.

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  3. 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.

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  4. 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?