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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.

18 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. For the best by LichtSpektren · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not only is this the optimal security practice, it also convinces corps still using that proprietary legacy crap to move to HTML5.

    1. Re:For the best by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2

      It's be nice if it would check to see whether a site offers HTML5 video and automatically drop it in over the Flash version.

      Reuters is my go-to news site; but it drives me nuts that they apparently sniff your browser and offer Flash if you're on a desktop and h.264 if you're on mobile. I could certainly spoof my browser identifier (and I have, occasionally) - but then I get stuck being presented with the gosh-awful "mobile" experiences some other sites offer up.

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    2. Re:For the best by jandrese · · Score: 2

      Maybe you could force it to use h.264 by uninstalling Flash?

      I only leave Flash installed on IE, and only fire up IE when I run across that rare website where there is no option than to enable Flash. Websites like that are exceedingly rare these days. It's usually just internal corporate crap that is only happy with IE anyway.

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    3. Re:For the best by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Interesting

      To make HTML5 work you also requires additional components not specified by HTML5. You hope they're all supplied by default by the browser maker but utlimately all you're getting is one company vetting their video versus a different company vetting a different video. And it's still proprietary.

    4. Re:For the best by macs4all · · Score: 2

      Maybe you could force it to use h.264 by uninstalling Flash?

      Users with "mobile" User-agent values get the H.264 video. Users with "desktop" User-agent values get "Install Adobe Flash Player".

      This has always annoyed me.

      If I can go to a site with my iPad and it happily serves up content, then that means the web monkeys have already "solved" that site's Flash-dependency problem.

      So why in HELL do they feel justified in PUNISHING me for not wanting Flash on my laptop? After all, even ADOBE wants people off of Flash, FFS!

  2. What's it going to take to get Netflix and Amazon by pecosdave · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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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  3. Re:Here, I broke your crutches... by jandrese · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Apple is notorious for this. They ditched floppy drives back when most hardware still shipped drivers on floppies. They switched to USB before most vendors were ready. Then they more or less abandoned optical drives when the world was awash in disks. Sometimes it seems like if someone like Apple doesn't come along and force the issue the industry will happily sit on old technology for well past its use by date.

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  4. Re:Here, I broke your crutches... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Sometimes it seems like if someone like Apple doesn't come along and force the issue the industry will happily sit on old technology for well past its use by date.

    Without Apple, we would be drowning in AOL coasters.

  5. Firefox is now considered irrelevant by web devs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:What's it going to take to get Netflix and Amaz by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  7. It's not a habit, it's Hollywood by Solandri · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Firefox is now considered irrelevant by web dev by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 2

    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?

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  9. HTML5 features? by mscdex · · Score: 2

    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.

  10. Re:Firefox is now considered irrelevant by web dev by _xeno_ · · Score: 2

    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.

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  11. Re:Firefox is now considered irrelevant by web dev by pecosdave · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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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  12. Re:IndexedDB by omfgnosis · · Score: 2

    https://developer.apple.com/li...

    Safari’s IndexedDB implementation now fully supports the recommended standard.

  13. Re:Safari is Mac-exclusive by Whorelander · · Score: 2

    My MacBook Pro 17", which is similar to that 2009 iMac, is not supported to run "macOS" and neither are better Mac Pros. Why is this?

    And I've upgraded two desktops -- one of which is from 2010, a Wacom Companion, and two notebooks( both from about 2010) to Windows 10 and it was an improvement in all cases. Outside of a USB-wifi adapter not having official support early on, something I fixed by simply installing the drivers for its chipset which are included with Windows, I've not had any other driver issues with Windows 10; and for the record, I really have not had driver issues at all since the XP days.

    And even though Apple only supports Bootcamp for "2" years after a Mac is purchased -- so my MBPro is stuck at Window 7 if I go through Apple -- I was able to upgrade mine to Windows 10 with the help of the community and it's been a nice improvement.

    I know it's not popular to say on this site( because some mods don't like reading contrary opinions. ), but Windows 10 is a solid OS and one of my favorites. It's given me the least issues of any OS, that includes OS X( but all around Mac OS in general has given me the least problems. ), and that's actually a massive achievement since this OS supports so many different configurations. Apple only supports a handful of hardware in comparison, and even then they drop support when it makes absolutley no sense. Considering how capable computers are from 2009( I had a quad core back then with gigs of RAM ), it should be no surprise that these computers can run modern OSs -- at least the OS that doesn't arbitrarily ignore specific configurations.

    And in relation to this thread, I no longer support Safari, I focus mainly on Chrome and Firefox.

  14. Re:Security from meddling add-ons by macs4all · · Score: 2

    The sites use scripting within the SWF to obfuscate the URL of the FLV.

    Doesn't seem to stop the better apps...