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Flash Will Soon Be 'Click-To-Run' in Microsoft Edge (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by msmash on from the final-nail dept.

Microsoft is following in the footsteps of other browser makers such as Apple, Google, and Mozilla, and says that upcoming Edge browser versions will favor HTML5 over Flash by default. From a report on BleepingComputer: "Sites that support HTML5 will default to a clean HTML5 experience," Microsoft said today. "In these cases, Flash will not even be loaded, improving performance, battery life, and security." On sites where Flash is needed, users will be prompted using a popup like the one seen below. Edge will ask users only once, and the browser will remember the user's choice for subsequent visits. Microsoft has already pushed these changes to Edge users on Windows Insiders builds. Regular Windows users will receive this update in the coming weeks.

41 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. I only use Edge... by unixisc · · Score: 1

    ...when I want to log into my Microsoft sites, like OneDrive

  2. HTML5 is nice and all by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Insightful

    but on older devices, Flash media playback is faster. So much so that I can still watch Youtube videos fullscreen on my older Atom-powered netbook with Flash, when the HTML5 player is choppy and horrible in Firefox. If only they made it a tad faster just for fullscreen video playback, I'd uninstall Flash in a jiffy. But it's not gonna happen. Still, while I can, I'm holding onto Flash just for that, because my netbook ain't fast but it works fine.

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:HTML5 is nice and all by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You have noticed Firefox is kind of horrible at pretty much everything now right? Try it with Chrome instead and see if HTML5 playback isn't better. I'm not a fan more Google, just disappointed and irritated with FF getting shittier every micro-upgrade.

    2. Re:HTML5 is nice and all by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'd rather suffer a million Firefoxes than anything coming from Google. Besides, I'm using Palemoon, which is a less sucky version of Firefox.

      --
      "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    3. Re:HTML5 is nice and all by OhPlz · · Score: 1

      One of the more recent updates to Palemoon made the HTML video work a whole lot better. Before that, yea.. it was almost unusable.

    4. Re:HTML5 is nice and all by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

      I'm using Palemoon, which is a less sucky version of Firefox.

      I've been looking at Palemoon a lot lately...what's the deal in terms of Firefox plugins / extensions, can you use them, or some of them?

      I'd definitely consider switching if it can support NoScript and Adblock, plus maybe one or two others. But NoScript and Adblock are "must haves".

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    5. Re:HTML5 is nice and all by narcc · · Score: 2

      You don't want to run Chrome on an older computer. It's been unusable on low-end machines for years now.

      FireFox, or one of those weird forks, is your best bet on older hardware.

      --
      Required reading for internet skeptics
    6. Re:HTML5 is nice and all by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Dude it's 2016.

      If your GPU can't do h.264/5 acceleration then it probably won't run Windows 10 that well or at all. That includes 2008 era netbooks. Modern Atom's do h.264 just fine at 1080P. Your phone has had hardware acceleration for years now.

      I had a coworker who owned a single core Atom from 2008. He returned it 3 days later as it couldn't even use Netflix on such a device.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    7. Re:HTML5 is nice and all by tepples · · Score: 1

      Which 10 inch "modern Atom" laptops are any good, for someone seeking to replace a 2008-2010 single core Atom laptop with something newer but not larger?

    8. Re:HTML5 is nice and all by antdude · · Score: 1

      Also, we need HTML5 blocker and on demand options.

      --
      Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
    9. Re:HTML5 is nice and all by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      I did have a surface 3. It was nice but it was short lived as someone stole it. It had the latest atom which was a quad core chip. Yes it was slow if you opened more than a few tabs of Chrome. However, it played Netflix in 1080P just fine and smooth without over heating and was great for Office work too.

      Intel no longer makes the Atom and now makes an m3 as it's predecessor. I believe they are dual core with hyper threading for light work

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    10. Re:HTML5 is nice and all by tepples · · Score: 1

      I thought Mobile Celeron N3350/N3450 "Apollo Lake" was the successor of Atom in tablets.

    11. Re: HTML5 is nice and all by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      The M3 is more appropriate and faster than a celeron for a netbook or tablet resembling more of an Atom.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    12. Re: HTML5 is nice and all by tepples · · Score: 1

      So why are the m3s $300 for the CPU alone? I used to be able to buy a whole netbook, including the screen, keyboard, RAM, case, HDD, and what have you, for less than that.

  3. Flash == AIDS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Flash has always been a disease. A secondary infection that enables a shockwave delivered pozzing of your machine. It is the HIV of the internet. This analogy is infinitely extensible.

    Captcha: echelon. I have no regrets.

  4. feature upgrade by sirber · · Score: 1

    Yet again, let's upgrade the whole OS to get new features in the browser!

    --
    Be or ben't
    1. Re:feature upgrade by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Yet again, let's upgrade the whole OS to get new features in the browser!

      Microsoft 101

      They play a jillion games to get you to upgrade shit. For example, they may support their very own older languages and tools, but it gets incrementally more difficult to support them, requiring goofball configuration fiddling.

      At first I thought it was just incompetence on MS's part, but looking at the pattern of their entropy, it's pretty clear it's intentional. For example, it may be a well-documented problem and accumulate tons of online questions and info on how to work-around the oddity, but MS still doesn't fix the newer environment to accommodate the older tool properly.

      Yet they quickly fix new shit they want to promote. Therefore, it's not the total hours of user headaches that dictates what they fix, but rather how much sales is generated (or not generated) by fixing it.

      It's like slowly tightening the screw of the vice clamp on your ass...ets until you finally Say Uncle and buy the damned upgrade and migrate to it.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
  5. Re: Blocking ads by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

    Maybe host file blocking is more effective though, than ABP. What do you think?

  6. Re:Alan Thicke Dead by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

    Sure. Is Stephen King dead too? Troll!

  7. Noticed the other day by The-Ixian · · Score: 2

    I am running Windows 10 on my gaming box.

    I launched Firefox (my main web browser still) as normal and I got a little tooltip thing stating that Edge is some % safer than Firefox against "social engineering attacks" WTF does that mean?

    I launch Chrome (used for Netflix and other streaming) and get the same message with a different (lower) % safer tooltip.

    Dually noted MS... thanks /rolleyes

    --
    My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
    1. Re:Noticed the other day by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

      It means Microsoft will infect and/or cripple Firefox if you don't switch. Seeing as how they're (obviously) already monitoring your system processes and applications in order to heckle you, I suspect it won't be very long in coming.

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    2. Re:Noticed the other day by The-Ixian · · Score: 1

      It does... I just use Chrome for the option of chromcasting if I want to.

      I like to segregate by function. That way all of my saved tabs in FF are relevant to what I am doing.

      I use Opera for work related stuff. Every time I open a browser, it is for a purpose, with all of the saved session states for that purpose.

      I could probably just use tab groups... but it just seems easier to me to do it this way.

      --
      My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
  8. MS is doing it wrong by Tablizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The prompt asks "Do you want to run Flash for this site..." [paraphrased]

    Ideally it should show a prompt or marker at the spot(s) on the page where the Flash markup is. Otherwise, it's hard to know what you are confirming, and you are confirming every Flash reference on the page once you confirm.

    You may enable it to view a video, for example, but could also be opening up Flash spam on the side. Spammers will master this trick of baiting. Page-level confirmation is too course a confirmation granularity.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
    1. Re:MS is doing it wrong by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      How about a yellow notice bar at the top of the browser window that says something like, "This pages has 3 Flash components embedded. To run each one, click on the [sample] icon. More info [link]."

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:MS is doing it wrong by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      some flash components provide backend support and don't even have a UI

      Can you give examples of such that are actually useful for something besides spam?

      If by chance such were actually needed, then a prompt can point out that it's a back-end component with no visible representation, and could ask the user if they want to run it, perhaps with an option to approve it "forever" for a given page and/or site to avoid repeated prompts.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
  9. Re: Blocking ads by houstonbofh · · Score: 2

    I like Pi-Hole. https://pi-hole.net/ Even blocks adds in my phone when on wireless.

  10. Re: Blocking ads by Wulf2k · · Score: 1

    I think the consensus last time this came up was that hosts-level blocking was more effective because it prevented 0-days.

    Somehow.

    I was a little unclear on the specifics, but there were definitely a lot of posts that seemed to be in agreement on that point.

  11. Re: Blocking ads by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

    If ONLY there was an expert in host blocking that we could count on to give us their expert opinion...

  12. Microsoft should take over Xerox by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 2

    After all, copying is in their genes.

  13. Welcome by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 3, Funny

    Hey Microsoft, 2005 just called and congratulated you for all the innovation and stuff.

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  14. Re: Blocking ads by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 2

    If ONLY there was an expert in host blocking that we could count on to give us their expert opinion...

    Legend has it that if you say his name three times he'll appear...

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  15. Flash must live on by Artem+S.+Tashkinov · · Score: 1

    This post will be hugely unpopular to the point of me being called stupid or moronic, but I'm gonna spell it out anyways.

    Even today HTML5 is nowhere near feature complete, fast and reliable as Adobe Flash is. In many ways ActionScript is better than JavaScript. Adobe Flash has powerful tools of dealing with streaming video/audio (including realtime bandwidth tuning), fast forwarding/rewinding and setting various video attributes. It's a lot easier to create complete solutions using Adobe Flash than to create a mishmash of SVGs, JavaScript, HTML, CSS and media. Adobe Flash just plays video/audio formats it's intended to play, vs. the dreaded HTML5 message, "Your browser doesn't support this media type" specially on platforms other than Windows. Adobe Flash, at least on Windows, seamlessly accelerates video decoding and rendering vs for instance royalty free VP9 codec which drains your battery several times faster because it's decoded using only the CPU.

    I have yet to see a library of rich content HTML5 games vs. literally thousands of Adobe Flash games which could be run on ancient hardware vs. modern web browsers which require at least a gig of RAM and a fast multicore CPU to render HTML5 demos.

    Adobe Flash has always been awful in regard to security but for what it's worth it's still indispensable.

    1. Re:Flash must live on by gtall · · Score: 1

      Sure, but then you must update Flash every damn week because, and this is the tricky bit, it has provably more bugs than the code contains.

      Some might call this a logical contradiction, but Adobe has worked hard on making this so. The only problem is, they cannot explain the contradiction, it just is.

    2. Re:Flash must live on by SavedLinuXgeeK · · Score: 1

      The second link doesn't run and asks to enable flash...

      --
      je suis parce que j'aime
    3. Re:Flash must live on by SavedLinuXgeeK · · Score: 1

      And apparently I spoke too soon. It just took a good while for it to start up.

      --
      je suis parce que j'aime
    4. Re:Flash must live on by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      For Flash games, I 100% agree.

      i.e. Normally I hate Tower Defense games but these ones are gems (pardon the pun)

      * Gemcraft Chapter 0
      * Desktop Tower Defense

    5. Re:Flash must live on by NotInHere · · Score: 1

      Most of the stuff you say is utter bullshit.

      In many ways ActionScript is better [stackoverflow.com] than JavaScript

      Actionscript doesn't have a modern execution engine and is terribly slow. Additional to that, that comparison is from 2010 and outdated by today's standards. If you really need those features, use the Typescript superset and compile it to javascript. Same result, just faster execution as js has actually fast interpreters and jit (ActionScript hasn't).

      Adobe Flash just plays video/audio formats it's intended to play, vs. the dreaded HTML5 message, "Your browser doesn't support this media type" specially on platforms other than Windows.

      This was an issue some time ago (when firefox didn't support h.264, but it changed in 2014...). Now you can use h.264: http://caniuse.com/#search=h.2...

      93.01% of your users will support it, mobile users included. How many mobile users have flash?

      Adobe Flash, at least on Windows, seamlessly accelerates video decoding and rendering vs for instance royalty free VP9 codec which drains your battery several times faster because it's decoded using only the CPU.

      Most (maybe all?) modern hardware sold today has already hardware based VP9 decoding built in, so its more of an issue with legacy hardware. Your information is outdated!

      And, if anything, its a problem with VP9 and not with HTML5. If you use h.264 for your videos (which flash uses as well), you get the same result.

  16. I'm sure..... by Heebie · · Score: 1

    I'm sure the 7 people who use Microsoft Edge probably care. To the rest of the universe, this is non-news. :)

  17. Ten Years Late to The Game, As Usual by ewhac · · Score: 1
    Install Firefox. Install NoScript. Poof! You now have click-to-activate on all plugins -- not just Flash, but Java, Silverlight, and others. Moreover, you authorize each occurrence of the plugin on the page, i.e. you can run the video player, but keep the frame with the Flash ads disabled.

    Yes, Microsoft, very "innovative"... (*derisive snort*)

    --
    Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
  18. Flashblock by PinkyGigglebrain · · Score: 1

    Since 2004

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

    For other browsers and platforms too

    'nuf said

  19. Re:I don't get it by tepples · · Score: 1

    And what happens if you transpile your ActionScript game to JavaScript?