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Firefox 69 Will Disable Adobe Flash Plugin by Default (zdnet.com)
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.
Not exactly what the Internet would have expected.
...and nothing of value was lost.
No sig today...
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.
So, where do i go if i want a browser with flash support.
Sure, disable flash by default. But as many things that involves computers, there's always people that have a use for it and/or want to access old content. I want a browser that has flash enabled. All the big vendors disabled it now. It feels they do not want to leave the choice to the user.
Having an up-to-date browser with flash is a better option than sticking to firefox 68 with flash and without updates.
They have until Septemberish to recreate whatever flash was doing on their web site in javascript or python, or whatever.
There should be plenty of job openings for contractors or new hires to replace the "functionality" Flash was "providing".
That being said, I just remembered I had an old Tag Cloud plugin for my web site that used Flash. I should probably check and see if there's something I could replace it with.
I'm probably either lazy about fixing stuff like this, or contented that once it's done, there were more important other things to do, like sorting my sock drawer.
I am guessing there is probably some mission critical Flash app someone is using, if so, in 2019, they're doing it wrong, and no longer have an excuse.
I've thought it comical that updating Flash shuts off the "Disabling the insecure version of Adobe Flash" warning in FF, because EVERY version of Adobe Flash is insecure.
It just takes a few weeks for someone to notice the top 10 current vulnerabilities, and turn the alarm back on.
Exactly what I did. What once ran in FF nicely tabbed now requires juggling at least 5 applications, including Chrome. Ditching XUL in the manner they did was the final nail in FF's coffin. I'd go back in a heartbeat if they started supporting things like FireFTP/FireSSH/etc. again - though with how pissed the addon devs were I doubt they would come back.
You mean it hasn't been disabled already?
I don't need this shit! When I see a company using that shit, I avoid it. When a business I use requires I use it then there is some very expensive tech support calls from me. And why use it?!
i guess i can delete my collection of.. holy shit, i have four and a half gigabytes of shockwave flash games?
admittedly, some of them don't run anymore - for example, the ones that end in .dcr...
Can you point to an unbroken instance of Gemcraft:Chasing Shadows that DOESN'T use flash?
Flash is so 1990's! It's hard to believe that we're still carrying around support for a 90's-style plugin. Nobody writes Java Applets anymore. Flash Player is a similar architecture. Download the full runtime into your browser in order to run the app. Contrast that with the built-in support of newer application frameworks. I've been ready to say goodbye to Flash and its security issues for 15 years!
Disease: Flash.
Can autoplay videos. Easy to workaround: block the plugin, even on a per-site basis.
Remedy: HTML5 videos
Can autoplay videos. Cannot be blocked. Some partial solutions include hidden config settings in browsers, and it may break sites.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
So, what are we admins supposed to do without Flash? Like it or not Flash is still a necessary evil since many IT vendor's managment utilities require it for config. I wish Vmware would finally dump the flash requirement (the HTML5 version does not have full functionality) and the requirement for Windows as a vCenter host. It's about the only thing left in our environment not open source.
And no, I do not want to switch to Chrome, I thoroughly dislike it and don't trust it.
Unlike your naive world of 2007, here in the future all ads are in fact user hostile
I agree with you that the vast majority of web ads are user-hostile. This includes any ad hosted by a third-party ad network or ad exchange, as those have a habit of stalking users across multiple websites to infer their interests in order to give advertisers the feeling of more control over what viewers see their ads. Ad networks and ad exchanges do this because interest-based advertising reportedly pays out three times as much per view as context-based advertising.
But "all" is stretching it. I don't see how ads that are hosted by a website's publisher, such as the display ads on Daring Fireball and Read the Docs, are user-hostile. Newspapers and magazines got along fine with this model for decades, despite web publishers complaining that they could never make money that way.
It appears you propose to switch from compiling C to WebAssembly back to compiling C to JavaScript using Emscripten. This will cause the output of the compiler to run slower in your browser, draining the battery of your laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Or alternatively, you could have meant to propose to switch from compiling C to WebAssembly back to compiling C to native code using a traditional compiler. In this case, you will lose out on ability to use an application at all because it happened to be compiled for and tested on a combination of instruction set and operating system other than the one you use. This could happen if you use a Mac or GNU/Linux PC but the application's publisher uses Windows or vice versa.
Armor Games has put a version on Steam. I haven't tried it, but more likely than not, it uses AIR, not Flash Player. Though AIR and Flash Player use very similar runtimes, AIR presents less of an attack surface because an application made with AIR is self-contained, not interacting with the web browser in the same way that an SWF object does.
Ok, I'll grant that strictly static text ads are not user hostile (since in the category of "hostile" I was think trackers and other cookie related nefariousness).
So I'd amend that slightly to say any ad that required any interactive component at all, from Flash to Javascript, to function...
The ads that you mention are so rare in nature though that I hesitate to not say "all" as it encompasses pretty much anything most people would ever encounter.
Just like you could possibly say not all falls from great heights are fatal, but enough are that you may as well just say all so no-one gets the wrong idea.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Think about the websites you visit: are there any you would really miss visiting that you wouldn't be willing to pay for
If I read only one article on a particular website, I might not want to buy an entire month of access. Subscriptions suck you into the filter bubble of the particular websites to which you currently subscribe.
even na token amount like 50 cents a month?
Of which the payment card industry would take 30 cents plus 3% of the total, leaving the merchant with about 18 cents.
Do you think the way Wikipedia is funded is appropriate for the majority of other websites?
The Wikimedia family of sites has the advantages of 1. being run by a registered charity, 2. being structured so as not to need to pay its writers, and 3. scale. It's an exception, and I doubt there is room for many such exceptions on the Internet. I further doubt that charity-run sites alone will provide enough demand for high-speed home Internet to keep home ISPs afloat.