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Firefox 69 Will Disable Adobe Flash Plugin by Default (zdnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the flash-must-die dept.

Mozilla will take the next major step in disabling support for the Adobe Flash plugin later this year when it releases Firefox 69. From a report: Firefox 69 will be Mozilla's third last step to completely dropping support for the historically buggy plugin, which will reach end of life on December 31, 2020. Flash is the last remaining NPAPI plugin that Firefox supports. Mozilla flagged the change, spotted by Ghacks, in a new bug report that notes "we'll disable Flash by default in Nightly 69 and let that roll out". Firefox 69 stable will be released in early September, according to Mozilla's release calendar.

2 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. User choice by imidan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is a good step. It's great that browser makers are generally not beholden to people like advertisers for money, so they can make more user-friendly decisions. I'd like to see more, though.

    I don't want autoplay anything in my browser. Especially audio and video. I use a plugin that aims to disable a lot of autoplay, but it doesn't always work. Why not have a browser flag that tells sites "I don't want autoplaying multimedia content"? I know crappy sites with video ads would ignore it, but more legitimate sites could respect it, potentially allowing them to save on bandwidth by not sending content to me that I don't want. I know I can stop it all by turning off JS entirely, but it's so integrated into so much of the web now that even simple sites barely work without it.

    It's a little different from "do not track" in that even legitimate sites have monetary incentive to track me regardless of how I set that flag. What incentive do they have to stream videos to me that I don't want to watch?

    Maybe I'm just in the minority in not wanting everything to be a video. Maybe the issue is that the sites have no motivation to obey "no autoplay" because it would cost developer time to satisfy a very small group of visitors.

  2. What about when we need Flash? by darth_borehd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How do we play or use Flash when we have to? I understand it is old, but there was a lot of content made for it. Some of it needs to still be used or enjoyed.