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Safari 10 In macOS Sierra Deactivates Flash, Silverlight and Other Plug-Ins by Default (webkit.org)
Apple's web browser Safari 10, which will ship with macOS Sierra, will disable Flash, Java, Silverlight, QuickTime and other plug-ins by default. The move will help the company improve the overall web browsing experience by focusing on HTML5 content. From a post on WebKit blog, authored by Apple's Safari team: When a website directly embeds a visible plug-in object, Safari instead presents a placeholder element with a "Click to use" button. When that's clicked, Safari offers the user the options of activating the plug-in just one time or every time the user visits that website. Here too, the default option is to activate the plug-in only once.
Watcha gonna do now, you tossers?
Not only is this the optimal security practice, it also convinces corps still using that proprietary legacy crap to move to HTML5.
Here, I broke your crutches so you can focus on your leg recovering. =P
Seriously, this is a good thing - but the way it is advertised is, frankly, ridiculous.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
to kick their Silverlight habit?
It's a plugin that should never have existed to compete where no competition was needed, and it sucks all around. I don't like Chrome either and for some ungodly reason Chrome is the only thing those two will respect where Linux is concerned, despite the fact Firefox will do HTML 5 video.
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Slashdot's failure to report the story proves that they hate children.
I don't know about the companies you listed, but many other web developers no longer consider Firefox to be a relevant browser. That means they don't even bother testing their sites with it. Maybe the sites will work, maybe they won't.
The latest web browser market share stats paint a very unfortunate picture for Firefox. It's now only about 6% to 7% of the browser market, across all platforms and all versions of Firefox.
To put that into perspective, Firefox now has roughly the same number of users in total that individual versions of other browsers (like IE 11 and iOS Safari 9.3) have. Even Opera Mini nearly has more users than Firefox has!
Firefox has only about one-third the number of users that Chrome for Android has, and even Chrome for Android has fewer users than desktop Chrome. Even UC Browser for Android has more users than Firefox.
Yes, Firefox was once a significant player. But that's no longer the case, now that Mozilla has driven away so many Firefox users by making one unwanted change after another. Firefox essentially cloned the worst parts of Chrome (its UI and soon its extension system) while ignoring the best parts of Chrome (its excellent performance and low memory usage).
Some people will wrongly blame "Google advertising" or claim that Firefox still has a "large absolute number of users", but those are both just excuses.
People use Chrome because, despite its bad UI, it's a lot faster than Firefox is.
Firefox's absolute number of users is still so proportionally small that it's not worth spending time and effort to support these users. It makes a lot more sense to ignore a few million Firefox users and instead focus on providing a better experience for the billions of people who use Chrome.
Based on the current trends, Firefox will continue to see its market share shrink each month. If you think it's being ignored now, just wait until it's down to 1% or 2% of the market. At that point even the big players with resources to waste on supporting Firefox won't even bother trying to.
On OSX (which this story is about), you don't need Silverlight. I have Netflix and use Safari to view it, and I have neither Silverlight nor Flash installed.
I make no bones about it. Wife and I don't have any and don't want any. Never could stand them.
I concur. I am watching Netflix right now on an El Capitan hackintosh, and I don't have Silverlight installed either.
Has anyone ever needed Silverlight?
Hollywood doesn't want you to capture the video stream and save it to generate a digital copy of the movie, so the stream is encrypted. But obviously the computer doing the displaying has to decrypt it. With hardware players like Smart TVs and Rokus, the manufacturer just has to demonstrate that the decrypted stream is sent directly to the display with no chance for the user to intercept it, and Hollywood is satisfied.
Software players are tougher, especially if you're playing the movie in a browser. So Netflix, Amazon, etc. create an encrypted virtual machine in Flash or Silverlight which decrypts the stream, and sends the resulting video directly to the computer's display. That's the only way Hollywood will approve software streaming video players.
This is why streaming video players drain your laptop's battery a lot faster than playing a local cracked copy of the movie, and why you need a Pentium-class CPU (used to be i3) to play 1080p Netflix or Amazon. Because the decryption is done in a software virtual machine, it can't take advantage of any video decoding hardware built into the device's graphics hardware - the CPU has to do everything. This is also why iOS got the Netflix app before Android. Apple only had a few iOS devices at the time, so Netflix could get the app approved as a hardware player. Android had hundreds of different hardware configurations, and the ARM CPUs weren't powerful enough to decrypt and decode the video stream in a virtual machine. So Netflix had to get Hollywood's approval one Android device at a time as a hardware player.
I stopped using FF about a year ago now. I guess when I got my new laptop. I just never bothered adding it. I don't like Chrome as much as I liked Firefox years ago, but Firefox kept morphing into Chrome. So why bother with both programs?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I think it would have been better if Safari actually supported as much HTML5 and related features as other browsers before making a move like this.
Has anyone ever needed Silverlight?
Only if one wanted to watch Netflix prior to them making an actual good html5 implementation.
Sadly, they still do a browser check meaning, on Linux at least, the only way you can actually watch Netflix is through Google Chrome or by one of the old workarounds.
Hopefully they'll stop doing browser checks and just let you watch on whatever browser you'd like but I'm not seeing that happening any time soon.
El Capitan hackintosh?
Components? Any problems?
Kind of like Firefox has been doing for a few months... What's also awesome, is that their new OS Sierra drops support for Mac Pros and Macbook Pros, but still manages to supports similar but lower speced consumer models. Wait, this isn't awesome, this is fucked up. What the hell?
5 years ago I had to write a file uploader for uploading very large files. One of the requirements was to chunk the files up into parts so we didn't have to send the entire file at once, as well as deliver progress bars for each file being uploaded, video preview, thumbnails, etc. At the time, you could not reliably create that functionality in the browser (and mobile was not a concern with that group).
Could it have been done in Flash? Possibly, but I was in a group of C# developers who all universally hated Flash and would not trust it no matter what. So at least in my group, Flash was a permanent no-go. So we used Silverlight and it worked very well.
Would I use it today, now 5 years later, of course not.
Then I'll stop visiting web sites that don't work with firefox.
Well, what do you expect if you're going to travel halfway around the country just to let your kid play with a talking rat?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I too am running an El Capitan Hackintosh. I followed the guide and parts list on 9to5mac by Jenn Benjamin, except I used the OSXWIFI card which is natively supported instead of the wifi and bluetooth dongle he recommended. Everything, I mean, everything works as it should. From continuity, handoff, sleep, sound, wake on lan, everything. I bought some parts used on eBay (cpu, ram, cpu cooler) and made out for under $900
Why is Android mentioned, that's not a full web browser, it's a phone/tablet that's going to serve up mobile versions of the web site, and firefox on mobile is always going to be used less than the built in browsers.
Web devs for years have been whining that they only want to support one browser ever, and now the IE is declining they're scrambling to find the next half assed browser to support and if it's Chrome we'll be stuck with Google's strange extensions to HTML instead of Microsoft's strange extensions. The more browsers the web devs test on the better the web site will be. If you want to slap 6-7% of your visitors then screw you (and I doubt your company's management have the same attitude you do).
"...and it sucks all around"
How so? Especially compared to Flash?
Well, boo hoo. Nobody fucking cares.
I like children, but I can't eat a whole one.
Depends if management can do math.
If the cost of testing in Firefox is higher than the cost of driving away Firefox users (and it almost always isn't, since the type of people using Firefox are the type of people who'll just use a different browser if the site fails), then it's simple: don't support Firefox.
Right now, we're at the point where the decision is easy: don't support Firefox. It isn't worth the effort, and generally if things work in Chrome, they'll probably work in Firefox. So Firefox isn't supported and I only ever bother testing things in Firefox if someone complains.
Well, in theory I only bother testing things in Firefox if someone complains. So far, no one has.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
What the fuck are you talking about? Chrome for Android is pretty much a full-featured web browser. You can optionally have it request the desktop version of sites. In that mode I've never found a site that it doesn't render like it would on a desktop.
And Firefox for Android isn't just used "less" than the built in browser. It's basically never used at all, by anyone. It has 0.04% of the market. Yeah, that's a fraction of a fraction of a single percent! To get a sense of how awfully Firefox for Android is doing, remember that Chrome for Android has over 18% of the market, and iOS for Safari has about 10%, and Opera Mini has over 5%. The funniest part is that even Blackberry Browser 7 at 0.09% has over twice the number of users that Firefox for Android does!
Web developers will support the browsers that people actually use. Today, that includes Chrome, Safari, IE and Edge. Firefox used to be on that list, but it is no longer because it has so few users. Firefox isn't tested with for the same reason that Mosaic and Navigator aren't tested with any longer: it's a waste of web dev time!
The reason Firefox is in this situation is because people keep saying it's not worth using and supporting. In other words, we didn't (and still don't) really care about any of this. We just want a browser like Chrome. Of course that doesn't stop us from feeling ashamed of ourselves and trying to blame everything on Mozilla for "not listening to us" and other nonsense arguments, but c'est la vie. We get what we wanted, no point in feeling ashamed about it. We just didn't care about anything Mozilla stood for, no matter how big of a game we talk.
Holy cow. But I shouldn't be surprised. 2010 was when I noticed it was getting kind of bloated. This was especially apparent when one of the computers in the school lab I worked in was found running a 1.5 release, which of course was blisteringly fast and lightweight. That was around the time I started using Chrome too.
Depends on your hardware. I think it has to do with DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) so if your video card doesn't support certain DRM extensions, you're forced onto Silverlight. I think the same happens on Linux - if you turn off DRM, you can't use Netflix.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
But they all have one thing in common: no one tests in Safari.
That became the case once Apple terminated development of Safari for Windows. This meant it suddenly cost $500 to $600 to buy a second computer on which to run a copy of Safari in which to test your site. And then you have to pay $500 to $600 more four to six years later when Apple stops porting new versions of Safari to your version of OS X or new versions of macOS to your Mac. For example, a 2009 Mac mini running Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" can't be upgraded past OS X 10.11 "El Capitan".
AOL started out as AppleLink Personal Edition, which means no Apple, no AOL.
Before it was AppleLink, it was Quantum Link on 8-bit home computers.
You are a horrible person. Nothing funny about this.
What's amazing to me is how prevalent this attitude is amongst people who pitched a fucking fit when a site was designed for IE. "Waaah! You don't support my niche browser that's stupidly different from IE! Waaah!" they'd wail. It's like all the Firefox hipsters jumped ship to Chrome and now love to shit all over everything else. Fortunately, the web's become an enormous wasteland of broken blog/spyware portals so nobody's missing much when you special snowflakes crap out another incompatible framework that renders your sites inaccessible.
Low memory usage? Look it's a fast browser but it's a memory hog. Right now for me 3 tabs - 6 instances of chome32 totalling 200 meg.
For starters:
Flash already existed. It didn't need something else to compete with it - it needed to go away.
Flash at least has an out of date Linux version. Don't tell me moonlight is Silverlight - too many issues.
Did we really need ANOTHER browser plugin?
Remember how IBM was the only company making well- IBM PC's? Then they went away and opened up the platform for other people to start making them. Then they decided to "take it back" and introduced the PS/2 platform to do so which was incompatible with all the rest of the hardware out there but would still run the software? I feel like Silverlight is the PS/2 of browser plugins and while most of us stood back and gave Microsoft the middle finger - just like we did to IBM - Amazon and Netflix didn't do as they should have.
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Netflix uses HTML5 in Chrome by default... they have been for a while. Both methods work fine.
In our company Firefox is the official browser.
We don't want our users on Chrome. Chrome runs processes even when it's not started that can peg a CPU - we've seen it happen. We don't trust what it's doing - especially while it's not running. Chrome is out for security reasons.
Also certain client pages require real versions of plugins like Flash and Java that Chrome won't use. Easier to keep the users corralled into one arena.
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I use Firefox for Android almost exclusively. I use Brave occasionally for a few things, I tried switching to Brave, but I just keep finding myself back on Firefox. Being able to check my history from my work machine while mobile or at home - vice/versa is nice too.
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Fuck you.
I was on Netscape when IE came out and I didn't jump ship to IE. Mozilla then Firefox where the natural evolution of things, all you IE people are the ship-jumping hipsters.
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I see Firefox at 14% (gs.statcounter.com). But you can shop around for stats, I still see one site showing IE at 33%...
Right now most web sites don't work at all on Firefox with no-script anyway. It's no big loss though, they're not web sites worth visiting.
The day Firefox won't render a site is the day that site will lose visitors.
It isn't just that the interface sucks, it isn't just that its Apple, it's that regardless of disabling plugins and feeling like Apple is really trying to focus on HTML5
You are on an Apple so your porn is gay.
Porn uses Flash.
If you watch porn on anything but Linux with script blockers it means Google knows if you like big tits or big dicks by tracking IP's.
Behind the scenes coordination with Facebook and the government and many other coordinated trackers means you are tracked as much as possible, especially if you use Windows.
Our university (a big research school) adopted some bullshit Silverlight app for recorded lectures. It handled two video streams: one the professor babbling, the other his or her Powerpoint nonsense. The student, watching at home (they admitted more freshmen than could be housed on campus, so they put some students into distance learning for a semester), could switch between the two streams at will. I'm sure someone clever could rig that up in HTML5+JS, but the University didn't employ clever people. So, we all had to download and install Silverlight. It felt so dirty to be violated like that, and not in a good way.
I have tried for the past year to get the flash and html5 video block to work in Firefox. Right now surfing the web is as painful as it was ften years ago, even though we have built in plugin blockers. Nothing works. If safari can restore my ability to browse, it will become my primary tool.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
despite the fact Firefox will do HTML 5 video.
Developers don't bother with Firefox these days because it is a niche browser on the PC which is an ever-shrinking section of the web browsing market. People test on Chrome because that covers the PC, Android phones & tablets as well as Chromebooks. Same goes for Safari because it is on the Mac, iPhones and iPads. Of course IE & Edge get some exposure by virtue of being available on 90%+ of PCs.
Why is Android mentioned, that's not a full web browser
Android is not a web browser, it is an operating system. Chrome is a web browser and it has an Android version which can serve up mobile or desktop sites depending on the Android use-case. Obviously if Android is used on a tablet with kb/mouse or on a large screen like a TV then often the desktop version is preferred and of course you can request the desktop version on an Android phone or tablet.
Web devs for years have been whining that they only want to support one browser ever, and now the IE is declining they're scrambling to find the next half assed browser to support and if it's Chrome we'll be stuck with Google's strange extensions to HTML instead of Microsoft's strange extensions.
What "strange extensions"? Microsofts ones with IE were proprietary extensions and plugins like ActiveX, Chrome does not have these. In addition Chrome is available on most major platforms and the predominant browser on all of them except for OSX and iOS. So testing for Chrome and Safari gets you full coverage for the dominant browsers on pretty much all platforms.
So use Chromium instead, you can look at the source code just like you must with Firefox.
Chrome runs processes even when it's not started that can peg a CPU - we've seen it happen.
No it doesn't and you can verify this by looking at the Chromium source code (if you feel it is different then you could always just use Chromium). But what you are most likely seeing is an application that embeds a Chrome browser within it that will run a Chrome process.
We don't trust what it's doing - especially while it's not running.
If it's not running then by definition it is not doing anything.
Stupid Logitech Harmony remote controls use Silverblight as the configuration UI.
I just wish Apple would fix it once and for all, not just for gewgaws.
By then, the browser was already around 3.0 or 3.5 and I distinctly remember using 0.9, the 1.0 pre-release and maybe even 1.5 because it was much faster. My problem has only lately been about ram, but pegged cores where the browser twiddles its thumbs is a new bother. Going back to version 24 from ~42 doesn't fix BOTH the performance and ram issues that come from running boogoo-tabs anymore. I got desperate the other day and started looking at pre-blink Opera, but in 2 more years we can all predict that Chrome won't have ANY competition on Windows 7, and I can't tell what exactly we'll be doing then...
My king ant does for his job. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Stupid Logitech Harmony remote controls use Silverblight as the configuration UI.
Not on OS X, they don't.
Probably for copy deterrence. Because major mobile browsers don't support the sort of extensions that desktop browsers such as Firefox support, it's easier for a user to run a stream recording extension on Firefox than in, say, Safari for iOS. So users of desktop browsers are required to do the streaming inside a piece of proprietary software that is opaque to browser extensions, namely Flash Player.
Gosh if it's not doing anything visibly then by definition it's not doing anything at all!
I guess magician use real magic then too.
I've used Chromium, I liked it. I don't want to deploy it in our organization due to the way that Chromium isn't exactly on a release cycle and did take a little intervention to get plugins working and what have. Easy enough for me, not easy enough for me x200 with systems elsewhere and I'm using a deployment system.
I'll check with the boss man and make sure it's okay to post the video he made proving what happened.
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cookie whitelisting already, please.
Gosh if it's not doing anything visibly then by definition it's not doing anything at all!
No I didn't say anything about "visibly", I said if it's not running then by definition it is not doing anything at all. If the program is doing something then the program must be running, this isn't particularly difficult to understand.
I'll check with the boss man and make sure it's okay to post the video he made proving what happened.
You don't need to do that, you can just look at the process tree and find out how/by who that chrome process was started. Like I said, many applications use the features of chrome with an embedded browser which will create a chrome process. If they wanted chrome to spawn a nefarious process they wouldn't be calling that process "chrome".
Pre-recorded media like [...] games
In order to use a native game offline, the user has to buy a device that runs the same operating system for which the game was made. HTML5 was supposed to circumvent having to make an app six times (for macOS, GNU/Linux, Windows desktop, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone).
Neither could the alligator. Kids look sweet but taste terrible.
You realize that this just makes you an apologist right?
Especially since the system we used as the proof didn't have anything that was going to call on Chrome.
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