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Firefox 55: Flash Will Become 'Ask To Activate' For Everyone (bleepingcomputer.com)
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.
*All* media should be click-to-play, regardless of format.
Seriously, what is the case for auto-playing? Does anyone like that?
Advertisers like it.
We, speaking of the majority, variously known as "the product" or "the victim", depending on how honest one is being at any particular moment, don't count. Because we, again speaking of the majority, will continue to return to sites that abuse us in this fashion.
I highly recommend a local blacklist. When a site does this, slap a 127.0.0.1 into your hosts file for the site name. This will prevent the site from ever loading into your browser again via normal links.
Or, you can keep going back. And they'll keep abusing you.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Now you can get all your ads served in javascript, and they're even harder to block.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
At least Flash can be blocked / click-to-play. While, in major web browsers, HTML5 video and audio auto-play by default with seemingly no way to disable.
Without running add-ons, is there any simple way to disable HTML5 auto-play in any major web browser?
In principle, any ad which a human can recognise as an ad, a machine can also recognise as an ad.
I thought the goal of ad blocking was to avoid the cross-site tracking, data transfer quota use, and CPU use of requesting, downloading, and processing an ad in the first place. For a long time, Flash's content-type on a site that doesn't have entertaining vector animations was a very good predictor of a particular element being undesirable.