Firefox 26 Arrives With Click-To-Play For Java Plugins

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 26 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions include Click-to-Play turned on by default for all Java plugins, more seamless updates on Windows, and a new Home design for Android. Firefox 26 has been released over on Firefox.com and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. Release notes are here: desktop and mobile."

Comments

great...

[lyapunov]

In the mean time they have made it substantially more difficult to configure the rejection of cookies.

Jesus... I'm actually thinking IE is better at this point.

Re:great...

[DMUTPeregrine]

Try the self-destructing cookies addon.
When you close a tab, the cookies created by that tab are removed. You can whitelist domains to prevent their cookies from being deleted.
This way, sites see cookies as being enabled, but can't track you after you close the tab.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing-cookies/

Re:great...

[sqrt(2)]

Try out Self-destructing Cookies. It allows cookies to be set, but once you close the tab they are deleted, or deleted on a timer, or both. You can whitelist sites with a toolbar button. Then set Firefox to always reject 3rd party cookies and you're safe as far as cookies go.

Re:A good start..

[Anonymous Coward]

NOW... Make flash click to play as well!

Flashblock extension does this to Flash. You can also white list sites you want to automatically run Flash (Youtube for example).

Re:Unintended consequences

[Darinbob]

The support for the new stuff is being demanded by web site builders but not by the actual end users. The web site makers want to promote their world view of browser-as-app-framework and if that means dragging the customers dragging and screaming so be it. Ie, Mozilla wants HTML5 to be adopted as fast as possible, thus it cares more about advertisers than users.

Re:A good start..

[bsmedberg]

We studied doing this for Flash as well. Check out the user research study. We determined that the vast majority of users would merely be annoyed by making Flash click-to-play, and we wouldn't actually be improving security or performance for most users.

As noted in other comments here, you can mark Flash as click-to-activate yourself in the Firefox addons manager, or get more fine-grained control over which Flash actually runs by installing an addon like Adblock.

Our long-term strategy is to make it so that nobody needs to use plugins by adding new web APIs; to reimplement content like PDF and Flash in JS so that we can have control over the performance; and to use the mobile web as leverage to get new sites to use native HTML APIs like <video> to wean the world off of plugins.

Re:Unintended consequences

[hairyfeet]

But whose fault is that? Put the blame where it lies, Steve jobs trying to push his appstore crapstore lock in. I have flash on my fricking THREE YEAR OLD single core cellphone and ya know what? plays great. try HTML V5 with H.264 on anything less than a dual core and see what you get,even with hardware acceleration its a fricking pig.

So call a spade a spade, the killing of flash on mobile didn't have a damned thing to do with compatibility, or battery life, it had to do with Steve jobs making damned sure you weren't getting shit on that iPad without giving him 30%.