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Firefox 55: Flash Will Become 'Ask To Activate' For Everyone (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the all-you-have-to-do-is-ask dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Starting with the release of Firefox 55, the Adobe Flash plugin for Firefox will be set to "Ask to Activate" by default for all users. This move was announced in August 2016, as part of Mozilla's plan to move away from plugins built around the NPAPI technology. Flash is currently the only NPAPI plugin still supported in Firefox, and moving its default setting from "Always Activate" to "Ask to Activate" is just another step towards the final step of stop supporting Flash altogether. This new Flash default setting is already live in Firefox's Nightly Edition and will move through the Alpha and Beta versions as Firefox nears its v55 Stable release. By moving Flash to a click-to-play setting, Firefox will indirectly start to favor HTML5 content over Flash for all multimedia content. Other browsers like Google Chrome, Brave, or Opera already run Flash on a click-to-play setting, or disabled by default. Firefox is scheduled to be released on August 8, 2017.

3 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Re:About time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Blasphemy. If Flash was truly worse than SystemD, it would have subsumed the entirety of WIndows into FlashOS by now.

  2. Re:I've had it on ask to activate for years by KiloByte · · Score: 3, Informative

    There's a large corpus of games, animations, and so on, written in Flash. Unlike DRM and advertising, those are actually useful.

    --
    The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
  3. Re:I used to blame flash for everything too by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's piles and piles of Javascript. They run browsers out of memory.