Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-cause-issues-are-on-blocklist

by cft • 11 years ago

931 367 11 years ago

support.mozilla.org

erichurkman• 11 years ago

Good, just leave it there.

thomasrossi2• 11 years ago

it was about time!

shurcooL• 11 years ago

I made it my new year's resolution in 2015 to have Flash disabled. For my use case, it works great. Longer battery, less heat, and the internet still works.

I do turn it on (enable) every now and then for some sites, but very few/infrequently and turn it off right after.

tajen• 11 years ago

I have all plugins disabled by default on my Chrome. I assume it's mostly Flash. It's very little disruption, actually:

* Plugins can be enabled using one click;

* The "Copy shortcut" widgets are disabled by default. Too bad, 2 clicks instead of one.

* Some videos are disabled on some news website. Too bad they won't be able to auto-play.

* I very rarely encounter websites (less than once in a month) where invisible plugins are required, so I need to restart the page with all plugins activated. I think Google's Not-a-robot Captcha has difficulties with that, if I remember well.

w342• 11 years ago

Linux still struggles with HTML5 and flash

viraptor• 11 years ago

Flash - sure, since Adobe doesn't really care that much. But HTML5? That's in browser's hands and support depends on your browser choice only.

Did you mean any specific codec for video playback, or something else?

JupiterMoon3• 11 years ago

EME is not present on Linux yet I think. I don't really mind this however it does mean no Netflix without Google Chrome..

vog3• 11 years ago

What does this have to do with HTML5?

Why on earth should Firefox ship a different HTML5 engine for Linux than for the other OSes? To me, it doesn't make a lot sense to assume Firefox provides a better HTML5 implementation for all other operating systems.

With all due respect, this comment seems to be more of an overall anti-Linux sentiment.

rockdoe10• 11 years ago

Actually, Firefox uses the platform decoders to decode patented codecs like H264 or AAC. So the operating system does play a role. I also think it's not unreasonable to believe that hardware accelerated H264 decoding works less well on Linux.

cousin_it2• 11 years ago

When all browsers disable Flash, a ton of old artistic content will become unaccessible. I'm thinking specifically about Homestuck animations and minigames, but other people will have their own favorites. Is there a good transition plan?

easytiger2• 11 years ago

Nope. no reasonable alternative to flash has proven viable. Which is crazy.

Sammi2• 11 years ago

Canvas, WebGL, Javascript?

If it's because you enjoy the Adobe Flash tooling, then Adobe is doing exporting to both Canvas and WebGL now.

http://www.adobe.com/inspire/2014/02/flash-html5-canvas.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/flash/how-to/flashpro-export-webgl.h...

rockdoe10• 11 years ago

Shumway?

TD-Linux5• 11 years ago

Shumway actually works pretty well on a lot of the old avm1/2 animations. Few run perfectly, but it shows that it is a practical way forward.

1ris• 11 years ago

Flash has become subject to retrocomputing.

There are plenty of PC Emulators aviable that run Windows XP and flash just fine. You shouldn't connect them to the internet though.

benguild• 11 years ago

However, it will also make it more secure by making it less of a target for hackers. If you have to enable it only for certain content … then great. That’s how it should be at this point.

Look at what happened to Java applets.

yoklov2• 11 years ago

Java Applets are hard to run on many machines (apple machines are especially bad in this respect), even for technically skilled users.

It would be very sad to see this become the state of all the old flash games/animations.

sosuke• 11 years ago

I've seen countless Flash animations turned into Youtube videos, which means the quality has dropped considerably.

yoklov2• 11 years ago

This is the biggest issue IMO. Seeing flash go the way of DOS and etc. would be very sad.

cpeterso7• 11 years ago

Someone could write an Adobe Air application to play old Flash content outside of a browser.

rockdoe10• 11 years ago

Seems like only a temporary block. Mozilla isn't brave enough to put it out of its misery like it belongs. Still some big sites using it though, like Twitch.

eterm• 11 years ago

My firefox has been blocking flash for a while (I've not updated it, so it doesn't load the old version.). The only site I switch to Chrome for has been twitch.

For anything else html5 video has been generally working. I've noticed a lot fewer annoying adverts too which is a bonus.

vultour2• 11 years ago

If Mozilla finally managed to implement the encoding Twitch uses for mobile devices, I'd finally be able to uninstall that pile of shit. Sadly it's a licensing issue.

rockdoe10• 11 years ago

Yes, Twitch is using HLS, which is patented. The rest of the industry is moving to DASH-via-JS-and-MSE. Even Steam Broadcasts use MSE now.

codewithcheese2• 11 years ago

I've been trying to solve this on Ubuntu 14.10. There does not seem to be an update path. I've installed the deb on https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ which does not resolve it.

dchest• 11 years ago

"All versions of Adobe’s Flash Player plugin are currently deactivated by default, until Adobe releases an updated version to address known critical security issues."

There's no updated version yet.

rockdoe10• 11 years ago

AddOns->Plugins->Ask to Activate

zeeed• 11 years ago

I hope this will be another push for content creators to abolish flash in the long term.

Aardwolf2• 11 years ago

I hope this will not make more content creators choose that annoying unity3D plugin thing that doesn't support linux for games.

rockdoe10• 11 years ago

Didn't they ditch that in favor of full HTML5?

ars2• 11 years ago

that doesn't support linux for games.

There is support: http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html

For me on debian it was install and it worked without even restarting the browser.

SXX2• 11 years ago

Good new for you. In September 2015 Google going to completely remove NPAPI support from Chrome. So Unity3D plugin will no longer work in Chrome and likely noone will use it for new projects.

http://blog.chromium.org/2014/11/the-final-countdown-for-npa...

reidrac• 11 years ago

I find amusing that visiting that same page triggers the 'Firefox has prevented the outdated plugin "Adobe Flash" from running on support.mozilla.org.' warning.

stevenh4• 11 years ago

The Flash plugin update fixing the RCE bugs is scheduled to be released tomorrow by Adobe, after which the block will be lifted.

sown• 11 years ago

I just noticed notice in the browser window. I didn't recall seeing it earlier so when I saw this headline, I clicked on the link.

I chuckled when I saw this: http://i.imgur.com/CHqRSEZ.png

proactivesvcs3• 11 years ago

Do you want to enable 'Adobe Flash' for the site adobe.com? [Never for this site]

xwintermutex• 11 years ago

What about Java?

sidewinder1282• 11 years ago

Java plugin you mean right the one that runs on browsers?. Java itself is a huge topic including JDK, compilers, runtimes, server side etc.

mahouse• 11 years ago

Of course he means that, do you know the thread you are posting to?

Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd• 11 years ago

Already happened 2.5 years ago: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2013/01/29/putting-users-i...

jetskindo• 11 years ago

Flash always have security issues and Adobe do their best to fix them.

On the consumer side of things, flash is not so bad. Sure search engines couldn't read it but there is amazing content generated through it. The content is,what matters and unfortunately the Web is littered with abusive flash objects auto playing videos, audio, full screen ads and those won't simply go away with flash.

At least with flash I can easily disable it. But those auto playing html5 videos and audios ads are just as annoying. Now I need plug ins to disable native capability.

It's only a matter of time until all ads move to the medium and we find ourselves complaining.

thomasrossi2• 11 years ago

It's not really a matter of ads, ads move the internet so they will always be there. It's a matter of security, flash has always been a source of flaws to be exploited. Like.. always, sometimes "trying their best" was really not effective.

hendry2• 11 years ago

One option was to go down the Click-to-Play route which offers a HORRIBLE UX. Especially on Youtube which still uses Flash by default.

Disabling Flash however, Youtube actually seamlessly falls back to HTML video. Well done. But I can't help but think, outside the Youtube world (BBC for e.g.). LOTS is going to break. I wouldn't take this tact with my parents or clients.

barrkel• 11 years ago

I much rather click to play over autoplay of videos, including on Youtube.

My browsing workflow involves a lot of middle-clicking links to open them up in background tabs. Autoplaying video is major annoyance in this context.

7Z7• 11 years ago

This is something that Safari on OS X gets so right, that I've long been amazed (and annoyed when I have to use other browsers) that the other browsers don't copy the functionality.

In Safari, if you tab out a new page, it will load the content but pause it until you show the page. So you can tab out a bunch of video pages and they each only autoplay when you tab through them.

Wanting the same functionality on Chrome seemed to involve plugins or clicking (which has now turned into right clicking and choosing play).

magicalist2• 11 years ago

Especially on Youtube which still uses Flash by default

No since January[1]. Maybe you have an old cookie set or something?

[1] http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/2015/01/youtube-now-defaults...

jhasse• 11 years ago

From the link: "and in beta versions of Firefox" Maybe he's still using a Firefox stable version a few months old?

JupiterMoon3• 11 years ago

If you disable Flash completely then Youtube works fine with HTML5 video. However, when Flash is set as click to play then Youtube still prompts to enable Flash. Annoying.

HugoDaniel3• 11 years ago

Unfortunately in this case avoiding the problem won't make it go away.

Many old sites will stop working (my first site was done in flash) as well as many games that are still heavily played today by millions of people. Also flash IDE provides a good introduction to programming for self-taught kids these days: many of them still do their first code in flash after clicking on "that strange icon next to photoshop".

Overall this is a good example of prolonged trusting a binary blob. IMO we will always tend to do what is more comfortable and we should strive for openness and transparency in the tools that most people rely for everyday.

The problem persists as long as there are people installing the plugin or "enabling" it.

We need a real open-source alternative to flash player.

JonAtkinson• 11 years ago

We need a real open-source alternative to flash player.

We quietly built the alternative to Flash over the last 10 years. It's called the web.

A standard document in the web browser can play audio, video, display vector graphics, utilise OpenGL, supports direct drawing via Canvas, and it is deeply scriptable with a mature, open programming language.

What else do you need?

fuzzix• 11 years ago

Copy to clipboard, apparently.

(Github project pages have a flash application to handle this)

HugoDaniel3• 11 years ago

Sorry, i meant alternative to the closed source flash player, keeping the same spec and not breaking compatibility. As implied by the comment.

probably_wrong• 11 years ago

What else do you need?

I need all of those things to look exactly the same in each and every browser, instead of corrupted icons or broken navigation because the developer tested it in Chrome for Windows but neglected, say, Iceweasel for Debian.

I have yet to find a non-flash game capable of doing that. And if the alternative is "we should discard this closed binary that works in every platform in favor of this free-but-browser-dependant stack", I find that odd.

michaelpinto• 11 years ago

The age old test of any platform is the ability to run games, and HTML5 just isn't there when put next to Flash or native apps. And I'm not talking the bleeding edge stuff, but simple things like getting sound to work between browsers (a task that Flash did very well). Although to be fair the gatekeepers of browsers are Apple and Google who want you to pay the app store tax.

dingaling• 11 years ago

We quietly built the alternative to Flash over the last 10 years. It's called the web.

The 'Web' can't play video or audio, the 'Web' needs plug-ins to do so. Plug-ins like H264 decoders and Flash.

sethd3• 11 years ago

* Streaming of live video using a single protocol across all browsers. (Some browsers don't even support a live streaming protocol)

* Adaptive bit rate video streaming (recorded or live)

Nice to have but not required:

* Full H.264/AAC support across all browser.

Unfortunately Flash is the only viable solution for the above right now.

vultour2• 11 years ago

When i wanted to start programming one of the things I tried was flash. I absolutely couldn't figure out what the fuck was going on even with tutorials, it's garbage.

exodust7• 11 years ago

That's strange, I found Flash programming very accessible. There's a huge amount of good learning material out there, and plenty of shortcuts and components you can use to do quite complex things.

Flash components were really interesting, and made it easier for non-programmers, or designers to manipulate a user-friendly "API" of sorts within Flash. This was very powerful. Hugely underrated and conventionality forgotten by the Flash-haters.

mrweasel• 11 years ago

I uninstalled Flash a few days ago, because I didn't want to deal with the updates anymore. Since Flash was unbundled from Mac OS X it has become a pain to update. I simply don't understand why I need to go to the Adobe site to get the updates.

Flash isn't super relevant anymore anyway, the main thing it's used for on my computer is Flash tracking cookies, and I can do without those. I do wonder how some of the tracking and retargeting companies will deal with the decline of Flash though. We asked a partner to stop using Flash for tracking, their response was that it's the best way to doing user tracking. Hopefully they'll change their mind soon.

franciscop• 11 years ago

The only other place where I've found that flash is relevant is in auto-play videos, so now with flash installed but disabled is basically removing the auto-play 'feature', which is really neat.

robin_reala3• 11 years ago

<video autoplay> ? http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/embedded-content-0.html#attr-medi...

JackWebbHeller• 11 years ago

The update process is horrendous. Redirect to Adobe's website, follow a 3-step 'wizard' - where Step 2 is a placebo 10-second loading bar saying it is "initialising" - and Step 3 is an advertisement for installing other crap from Adobe.

After all that you have to download a DMG, close all your applications and reinstall from scratch. Why not just build in an auto-update in the background and be done with it...

mschuster91• 11 years ago

On Windoze, I always go to google for "flash player distribution3" and install the MSI packages for enterprise deployment. That keeps me from the malware bundle.

rockdoe10• 11 years ago

If you're on Windows and are not careful you risk ending up with McAffee as a drive-by!

_Ogre• 11 years ago

On the Mac, it's easy, I use Chrome as my Flash jail. I use Safari all the time and the few times I need Flash I fire up Chrome and it's there. Don't have to worry about Flash hacks or Chrome battery drainage.

dzhiurgis2• 11 years ago

Been doing the same for years now. Don't see why people are still discussing it.

vbezhenar3• 11 years ago

HSTS subdomain tracking is probably the best method of tracking, because it works in private mode and there's no easy way to clear those "cookies".

orf• 11 years ago

I uninstalled Flash about a year ago and haven't looked back since. Funnily enough only Facebook used to give me issues.

rplnt• 11 years ago

I have Chrome with flash installed (not that it gave me any choice), but other than that I haven't had flash for maybe two years. If I need to play Flash, I just open Chrome for that. Facebook is one of the last common offenders with its flash videos on desktop version. I can't comprehend why...

velcro• 11 years ago

Bugs are always bad (and security bugs even more so) - but I've always felt that Flash gets a disproportional amount of hate/hype in the media. To some degree it should be normal that the more widespread a technology is - the more it gets targeted for security exploits.

If you run the popular browsers/plugins against the National Vulnerability Database, you'd get the following results (as of January 2014):

  - Internet Explorer 366 total vulnerability issues (314 high severity)

  - Google Chrome 235 total vulnerability issues (154 high severity)

  - Adobe Flash 207 total vulnerability issues (169 high  severity)

  - Mozilla Firefox 190 total vulnerability issues (86 high severity)

  - Oracle Java 161 total vulnerability issues (69 high severity)

[source] https://nvd.nist.gov/

yRetsyM• 11 years ago

Yes, but Flash alone doubles the attack vector of a browser - that's nothing to be sneezed at. I think it's particularly poignant when you look at the high severity metric.

tiplus• 11 years ago

I am not sure the attack vector argument is 100% valid here, as flash replacement technologies constantly add attack vectors to modern browsers, too. Many traditional Flash features are now covered by webGL accelerated browser functionality, like accelerated 2D canvas elements. My guess would be that this browser-gpu bridge creates a whole zoo of GPU driver related security issues which attackers might focus on once flash is completely obsolete. (My money is on a remote code execution vulnerability in the Firefox Adobe DRM module.)

onion2k• 11 years ago

So Flash is second in terms of number of high severity bugs and first in terms of the percentage of bugs that are high severity, only being beaten by Internet Explorer. By your evidence the hate for Flash is quite justifiable.

philh• 11 years ago

It's second to IE in both those metrics, but "percentage of bugs that are high severity" seems like a strange thing to be measuring in any case.

ild2• 11 years ago

Flash bugs are more important because the are crossbrowser. I will still use Flash though on older computers, because it needs less resources for video.

stevenh4• 11 years ago

Remote code execution exploits were found in Firefox at least once per month during the first half of 2015. The only reason we didn't hear about these cataclysmic exploits is because it wasn't Flash.

January 20, 2015: https://community.rapid7.com/community/metasploit/blog/2015/...

February 25, 2015: https://msisac.cisecurity.org/advisories/2015/2015-018.cfm

March 1, 2015: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2015-3...

April 22, 2015: https://msisac.cisecurity.org/advisories/2015/2015-046.cfm

May 12, 2015: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2015-5...

Hackers search for remote code execution exploits in Flash first and foremost because they know a successful Flash exploit will reach the highest number of targets (90% or more on the desktop) whereas only 44% of desktop machines are running Chrome and 15% are running Firefox.

Hackers seeking out and exploiting RCE bugs in Firefox is unheard of for the same reason malware targeting Macs has been virtually unheard of over the past decade: It's not that OS X is more secure; it's simply that Windows is a more lucrative target.

rockdoe10• 11 years ago

Mozilla seems to take anywhere from 1 to 3 months to fix these severe bugs. Adobe takes days.

Source for this complete and utter FUD? Certainly not the links you gave:

Jan 11, 2015: Originally reported to Mozilla as a low-severity DoS, which turned out to be already patched in trunk Jan 13, 2015: Firefox 35.0 shipped with patch

It's hard to get dates out of the others because the bugs are still hidden, but the "fixed in" is often a security fix update after a release, which means it can't possibly have been > 6 weeks.

halayli• 11 years ago

You probably missed out on the hacking team leaks. These actions are triggered by the leaks. HT was sitting on a lot of flash 0-day exploits.

This leak was the best thing that happened to the web.

paublyrne• 11 years ago

They do get more bad press than perhaps others should. There is already a perception about Flash that it is not a great product, which feeds into this. Reasons are varied.

    - Performance has not been good on Macs (my 2007 Macbook Pro literally burned my legs when running anything flashy)

    - Flash updates mechanism seems a little spammy.

    - Long-term perception of Adobe as a maker of a somewhat buggy, somewhat bloated software

    - Steve Jobs' public denigration

    - Backlash against proprietary standards being used on the web

The best thing about click to play Flash is it puts a stop to autoplay videos on the less reputable sites I occasionally and shamefully glance at for sports news.

visarga• 11 years ago

... and makes pages load faster.

Mimu• 11 years ago

I don't think the hate comes from bugs or exploits. I think people hate flash because it is laggy, slow, make things move in your screen you don't want, widely use for ads or to shit on the user experience, etc.

Granted most of it might be bad programming, but I still think he comes from here rather than exploits.

kristopolous• 11 years ago

Clearly all this crap will still happen in a flash free world.

vbezhenar3• 11 years ago

Turing-complete machine running untrusted code is a nightmare for security. There always be bugs and exploits, it's just a matter of time and effort to find them.

JavaScript enabled by default is already bad enough. We don't need Flash, Java, ActiveX or anything similar turned on by default. So it's a good move from security viewpoint. Less attack surface.

proactivesvcs3• 11 years ago

I have a lot of experience of end users and they are forever telling me that they get so many different "Update this", "Update that" windows that they can no longer distinguish real from fake. Some of them have been tricked by fake web site pop-ups as a result, others ignore legitimate update messages. I do not blame them.

Internet Explorer and Google Chrome get updated in a way that most end users find to be simple to understand, particularly with Chrome. Firefox is also quite good in this regard. All of them are reliable - it is rare, IME, to come across a Windows Update, Firefox or Chrome instance which is silently failing to update. Or not even bothering to prompt to update.

Flash, however often I install it, just doesn't seem to auto-update reliably. Quite often it only does so after a user log on/reboot, which doesn't happen much in the days of standby. Even on brand new, fresh Windows installs (so we know the OS/Flash isn't broken), I test Flash from time to time and it just doesn't prompt to update at all on some occasions. This is what makes Adobe's poor track record exponentially worse - that their software update mechanism is crap at best.

I was gobsmacked when Microsoft declared they were going to start updating Flash via Windows Update. Gobsmacked and so very relieved. It felt like they'd walked into Adobe's office, grabbed their fire extinguishers and told them "You are so useless that when there's a fire, WE will come and put it out, since you don't seem able to. We are sick of our offices getting burned down because of your idle incompetence."

I won't even address Oracle's Java. Bundling malware with their updater is tantamount to crime.

Coding_Cat• 11 years ago

Flash also comes with McAffee (or some other bundleware). I wouldn't be surprised if the reason why they haven't made a proper auto-updater is because of that. That they'd miss out on those miniscule profits they get from that.

fao_2• 11 years ago

  I have a lot of experience of end users and they are 
  forever telling me that they get so many different "Update 
  this", "Update that" windows that they can no longer 
  distinguish real from fake. Some of them have been tricked 
  by fake web site pop-ups as a result, others ignore 
  legitimate update messages. I do not blame them.

One solution to this is to use AdBlock Plus. When a site permits adverts that threaten a computer's security, it is time to add it to the blocklist.

syntheticnature2• 11 years ago

I have had multiple non-technical friends, in one case on a fresh install I'd done myself, run into the Flash update window simply showing a gray background that never does anything.

The best solution for this, from Adobe's own forum? Find the corporate-deployment version, download that (ignoring the messages that say it isn't what you want) and run it. This works flawlessly, but even less automatically.

Both the Flash and Java updates almost feel like "Pay Attention To Me!" Just like all those discount cards that exist in part so you carry around a fetish with the corporate logo.

joosters• 11 years ago

Yes! I admin my parents' computers and after trying to explain which 'update' windows are genuine, I realised that there just isn't a good way to tell them apart.

Silent auto-updates are really the right way to go for non-techies. Even the post-upgrade 'announcement' popups are confusing. For instance, I've installed Ghostery on their computers and the 'ghostery has been updated' popup is just confusing for them, leading to confusion and phone calls to me.

Flash also doesn't seem to auto-update for them, despite me setting it up. I don't understand it either, as they turn off & on the machine regularly. Why can't Adobe get this right?

jfuhrman• 11 years ago

Flash bundles things like Chrome, Mcafee etc.

That's the real reason they don't want a auto-update. Google pays them a lot for bundling Chrome(I think it's around $1 per install). They keep breaking the auto-update on purpose so that they can make a ton of money by bundling other software. Same with Java updates.

jafingi• 11 years ago

So by disabling Flash by default, Mozilla can theoretically reduce vulnerabilities by half :-) Seems like a good choice to me!

Also, getting rid of the constant update dialogs and crapware installed with Flash will improve the overall user experience.

richardw2• 11 years ago

Cost/benefit seems higher for Flash/Java than browsers. You really need a browser, but you don't really need a [fancy thing that can't be done in JS]. As another commenter said, it doubles your attack surface and for little benefit.

Flash game enthusiasts would probably disagree, but most of us can probably do without it given the risk.

syntheticnature2• 11 years ago

As an enthusiast for a handful of flash games, it is increasingly tempting to make a VM just for running them. Even then, with all the progress in Javascript, it's questionable whether I should bother.

braythwayt• 11 years ago

Yes but Flash vulnerabilities are incremental vulnerabilities.

So just counting high severity vulnerabilities, the chart is

IE: 314. IE with Flash: 483.

Chrome: 154: Chrome with Flash: 323.

Firefox: 86. Firefox with Flash: 255.

And of course, you can add a third column for Java and a fourth column for browser with Flash and Java.

I have no idea what their bugs-per-line-of-code are, perhaps they have the finest code on the planet. But from a surface area perspective, installing Flash makes you more vulnerable, period. And it really is not necessary, whereas it’s not like you can browse the web in pure Flash and not install a browser.

anon13853• 11 years ago

But from a surface area perspective, installing Flash makes you more vulnerable, period.

So does turning on Javascript. Yet the popular opinion these days is that disabling Javascript makes you a luddite. Mozilla even hid the option for it in Firefox.

DavideNL• 11 years ago

If you run the popular browsers/plugins against the National Vulnerability Database...

That's misusing statistics, you can't determine how secure something is by just summing up the number of vulnerabilities - equally weighing/comparing browsers with a plugin etc.

By the way, Apple's opinion on Flash in 2010:

Third, there’s reliability, security and performance. Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

Source: https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

ArtDev• 11 years ago

Flash is blocked on Apple devices due to business reasons, nothing more.

zimbatm• 11 years ago

Another point that hasn't been raised yet: Flash is a much smaller software than a browser, how come it has more bugs ? It certainly speaks for it's internal code quality.

belorn• 11 years ago

In general, plugins are supposed to improve a product by adding or enhancing existing features. Flash however enables websites to break out of the HTML, CSS and JS environments and their security constraints, which should mean that flash have a larger responsibility regarding security. If Flash lived under the constraints of the browser own security, then flash bugs would barely register as news worthy.

bzbarsky• 11 years ago

The bigger question is how many of those were 0-days: vulnerabilities that were public before a version of the software with the fix had shipped.

shocks• 11 years ago

I uninstalled/disabled flash on all my systems a few months ago, and have noticed barely any impact on my browsing. The only site I can think of that doesn't work is BBC News.

AndrewDucker• 11 years ago

I have that setting already set - Flash is set to "Ask to Activate", which means it only runs on sites that I actually want it to run on.

Which prevents a lot of autoplaying videos, and also pages sometimes taking a long time to load on slow connections.

billpg• 11 years ago

They've implemented "ask to activate" badly by making it cover the whole page instead of per-element. They did it the right way in the past.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=886792#c41

maxerickson• 11 years ago

Is it possible to activate Vimeo when using flashblock yet?

Which is a reasonable question in this context:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=886792#c1

kozukumi2• 11 years ago

God will Flash just die already. Firefox is my primary browser and I run it without Flash. On the very odd occasion I need it I have IE in protected mode which has Flash built in. If a site does use Flash I will seek an alternative though as I hate it that much.

On a side note Firefox without Flash is so much smoother. IMHO it is the fastest and most stable browser when it doesn't have Flash bogging it down.

paganel• 11 years ago

God will Flash just die already.

5 to 7 years ago I would have said the same thing, I hated Flash with a passion. But now, when it's almost gone for good, I see that it had its reasons. For example the new Google Street View is many times slower and lags so much as to give me motion sickness (when it's not blocking my browser) compared to the previous version, which was Flash-based, and which used to work like a charm.

jacobolus• 11 years ago

The new Google Maps is also dramatically slower, laggier, and buggier than the old version which was a regular web app built to work on browsers from 2005.

I think the terribleness of recent Google web front-ends (not only Maps and Street View but also Search, Mail, Groups, Gplus, etc.) is mostly a product of incompetent management process internal to Google, rather than an indictment of web technology generally.

vbezhenar3• 11 years ago

Here's flashless street view from Yandex: https://maps.yandex.ru/-/CVcbFJYs

I don't have much problems with Firefox, it seems to work smooth. May be it's Google's fault?

baumgarn• 11 years ago

Flash should still have its legitimation as an authoring tool. I think the direct approach in which you can throw together a scene or an animation has its value. The tools you use influence design decisions. Of course, technology wise, we should be happy without it. But if you always start a project with coding first, it limits your thinking. I fancy all the nice webgl demos and data visualizations, but they mostly lack a meaningful human perspective. Authoring tools like Flash and Director did provide a different feedback loop, not a data point of view but a narrative one.

programmernews3• 11 years ago

The problem is the long tail of sites or site features that don't work without flash and users who rely on those sites or site features.

I've heard Facebook video and last.fm streaming don't work without Flash for eg.

Gys• 11 years ago

Maybe you missed this ? But this whole discussion on the death of Flash was started by Facebook: http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2015/07/13/flash-aah-aah-its-...

kozukumi2• 11 years ago

I've heard Facebook video and last.fm streaming don't work without Flash

Regarding Facebook video, I fail to see how that is a bad thing ;)

dzhiurgis2• 11 years ago

I was surprised about last.fm not working without flash but it turned out to be ad blocker problem.

zvrba2• 11 years ago

Tidal and Deezer are others which require flash. Both have desktop apps, however.. Tidal's desktop app is awful and laggy to the extent I prefer using the web interface; Deezer's Windows app lacks some features compared to the web player.

throwaway7767• 11 years ago

The spotify web player unfortunately requires flash as well.

kevin_thibedeau• 11 years ago

On a side note Firefox without Flash is so much smoother. IMHO it is the fastest and most stable browser when it doesn't have Flash bogging it down.

That is primarily because of the flash ads being dumped. An ad/flash/js blocker achieves much the same and then some by further reducing the latency to collect everything needed to render.

Quarrelsome5• 11 years ago

Will someone actually go ahead and implement the required features in the browsers? Last I checked there is still no cross-platform way to do video publishing without flash. The option we now all have is multiple platform specific implementations.

sethd3• 11 years ago

Unfortunately Flash still fills a couple gaps in browser support: live video streaming and adaptive bit rate streaming (live or recorded).

I posted a similar comment about it the other day: [0]

Personally I would like to see HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) [1] implemented in the all the browsers, it's a nice lightweight protocol and would be the path of least resistance since it's already used heavily in the mobile space.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9874338

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming...

nacs• 11 years ago

Agreed. I was looking into this streaming/live video issue as well and there really is no cross platform method of doing this without having a Flash fallback.

For everything else however (like pre-recorded video, games via WebGL), Flash should be phased out.

dblohm7• 11 years ago

Mozilla performance dev here: Our data backs this up. 4 out of 10 of our top most frequent janks are due to Flash initialization. I'm working to make that all work asynchronously until the time comes when we can kill NPAPI altogether.

jsingleton• 11 years ago

From the page:

"All versions of Adobe’s Flash Player plugin are currently deactivated by default, until Adobe releases an updated version to address known critical security issues."

This implies that it will be reactivated soon and this isn't a permanent block. It looks like the same mechanism that blocks old and vulnerable versions of plugins like Silverlight.

That said, I've not installed flash in years. I use Firefox as my main browser with no plugins and IE/Chrome have it embedded (both auto-update with no system restart required).

xmj• 11 years ago

I've been maintaining the FreeBSD port of the Flash 11 linux software for a year or so.

The one thing I have learned during that time is:

How to write a good VuXML entry.

I agree with the general sentiment of removing Flash, and will do my part in convincing others that FreeBSD (and, derived, PC-BSD and FreeNAS) should probably consider setting an expiration date for Flash, then at that date delete it.

gendoikari• 11 years ago

Overall, it's a good thing. Flash is a proprietary technology from the past. Lets move on guys...

btzll• 11 years ago

Let's move on to Silverlight!

giancarlostoro3• 11 years ago

If only that were the case, but they're abandoning Silverlight. It was actually much more stable for me under Linux than Flash ever was sadly, but they stopped developing Moonlight as well.

Quarrelsome5• 11 years ago

To what? Last I checked the browsers haven't implemented a proper means of doing cross-platform video publishing (video + audio) reliably yet.

acd• 11 years ago

Flash is also shipped by default and enabled in Google Chrome.

Here is how to deactivate it

You need to go to chrome plugins and disable it chrome://plugins/

SXX2• 11 years ago

Keep in mind that flash plugin that bundled with Chrome using PPAPI and running inside sandbox. So some exploits don't affect that version all due to different architecture and to escalate privileges some Chrome sandbox exploit would be needed as well.

darkhorn• 11 years ago

I wish Facebook and YouTube won't use Flash at all.

psychometry• 11 years ago

They don't; that's HTML5 video.

bopf• 11 years ago

This is terrible for anyone who relies on Flash to get any kind of interactivity going inside the FB timeline. It would have been better if FF would just display a warning and then let the user decide if they want the Flash content blocked or displayed. Obviously it would be even better yet if FB would finally allow interactive HTML 5 content in its timeline.

TheWoodsy• 11 years ago

This is priceless http://i.imgur.com/3uNsIF2.png

CmonDev• 11 years ago

The final act of HTML5 delusion - it becomes "ready" because we say it's "ready". It's just someone forgot to ask Flash (game) developers' opinion. Not that it matters, right?

ddalex• 11 years ago

And since when you have to please everybody ? Flash developers are a minority, and they have no power to influence the market.

The sooner Adobe abandons the dead horse, the better for all of us. Kevin has gone away for years now, and Adobe's force is not based on Flash anymore (disclaimer: I own Adobe stock)

acomjean• 11 years ago

I did the "click to activate" option for flash in firefox. I like it. (Safari and chrome can do this too). This way if flash is activated when really needed.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/set-adobe-flash-click-p...

I feel your pain. The university site I'm working on has flash protein visualizations. We're finally moving visualizations to js. We'll get there, but with flash being kinda turned off, users will have to turn it back on manually or our pages won't work till rid of flash.

marcosdumay• 11 years ago

It's a click away.

And calling it unsafe, well, that's the truth.

dannypgh• 11 years ago

You really think the opinion of game developers should matter in a discussion about how to make browsers reasonably secure for people to use without getting their hosts compromised? Because I don't.

Anger towards browser developers or HTML5 is misplaced; you should be angry with Adobe for the fact that Flash is buggy, insecure, and closed-source.

hudell• 11 years ago

I know HTML5 doesn't have all of Flash features, but as a user, I'm glad that I won't see random pages using flash without need.

this_user• 11 years ago

It's 2015 and it has been clear for at least 5 years that Flash was going to die eventually. If you still haven't migrated away or - worse - are still developing new apps in Flash, it's your own fault.

vlunkr• 11 years ago

Haven't all the flash game developers moved on anyways? To either mobile or steam.

Crito3• 11 years ago

It's 2015. Nobody gives a shit about flash games in their browser.

eatonphil• 11 years ago

Does anyone know why this is showing up on Github as well? I just saw this banner when I logged in. Why would Github be using Flash?

(A quick Google search shows they used to use it for the network graph but it is now Canvas.)

darcyparker• 11 years ago

Github uses flash for the 'copy to clipboard' button to copy an http or ssh url to the clipboard.

ravishi• 11 years ago

Don't they use it on their "copy URL button"?

mbel• 11 years ago

They seem to use it for clipboard access, some repository links have a button that puts the URI in you clipboard automatically. I'm not sure if there is anything else they are using it for.

johnchristopher• 11 years ago

In addition to clipboard access flash is also used to provide alternate upload mechanisms. See Dropbox for a good example (and the failover UI).

mythmon_• 11 years ago

Hey, thanks for the headsup. We had an old component that we used as a fallback for certain kinds of videos that was always active. It was a legacy component that just got forgotten. I removed the Flash fallback about half an hour ago, so this shouldn't be showing up anymore.

kailuowang• 11 years ago

AFAIK, the only way for javascript on a website to copy something into your clipboard is through Flash. It might be a good thing to prevent such functionality, but I wonder if Firefox took this into consideration.

longwave• 11 years ago

That is simply not true, there are some limitations though these are being removed in newer browsers: http://caniuse.com/#feat=clipboard

silon7• 11 years ago

They should have made it load slower than Java a long time ago.

vamur• 11 years ago

Good riddance. Hopefully, they not only deactivate it but remove Flash and Java altogether. These two have been nothing but constant security and performance issues. And without Flash, Firefox can finally work on GTK3.

manishsharan• 11 years ago

Is Shumway ready for production use as a drop in replacement for flash ?

digi_owl5• 11 years ago

Last time i tried it it could not even handle Youtube.

0x02• 11 years ago

Adobe promising an update "during the week of July 12th"... That was last week. Or are they for some reason counting last week's Sunday as part of this week?!

amyjess3• 11 years ago

Last week's Sunday was July 5.

The week of July 12 is this week.

0x02• 11 years ago

Not where I'm from :)

phs2501• 11 years ago

They are an American company and America typically counts Sunday as the start of the week.

edpichler• 11 years ago

Anyone knows if it is technically possible to have the old "copy to clipboard" function without Flash?

someguy1233• 11 years ago

There's a native cross-browser API that's slowly becoming more compatible from Javascript.

http://caniuse.com/#feat=clipboard

marksc• 11 years ago

Mark from Mozilla here.

To be clear, by "blocked" Flash we really mean enforced click-to-activate. User choice is always a #1 priority at Mozilla.

We regularly block vulnerable plugins. What made this block different was that we did it before Adobe made an update available. Now that Adobe has released an update, it is no longer true that every version of Flash Player is blocked in Firefox.

However, we're glad to see the conversation this has sparked. Personally I align with Alex Stamos regarding Flash, in the thinking that a formal EOL would be great.

I'd also like to use this space to make a shameless plug for Shumway, a project set on building a faithful an efficient renderer for the SWF file format without native code assistance. Ending Flash doesn't need to mean an end for Flash media. http://www.areweflashyet.com/shumway/

Edit: typo

farawayea• 11 years ago

This is great. Let's continue: remove pocket, remove hello

hartator• 11 years ago

I wouldn't mind these two as assumed business decisions. But please stop the hypocrisy. It's just hurting Mozilla image without fooling anyone.

glogla• 11 years ago

Hello is just few (hundred?) lines of Javascript giving UI to WebRTC.

Unless you want to remove WebRTC and that's just stupid.

baby3• 11 years ago

Oh please don't remove pocket, this is one of the awesome feature of Firefox along with Tree Style Tab (and if it was just me I would add Tree Style Tab by default as well)

(And of course I go against the public opinion here on HN, but I wonder how many people did actually use Pocket before trashing it?)

techwizrd• 11 years ago

Just out of curiosity, how will removing Pocket integration and Hello (a thin UI over WebRTC) personally? Both are lazy-loaded, so the only bloat they add is "visual bloat". This behavior is seriously disappointing from the Firefox community.

I've been using Pocket since it was Read It Later and I was pleased to see it integrated into the browser. Mozilla is working on a Reader mode[0] but it does not seem to be ready for public consumption yet (despite landing in 2012). Most people don't even know it exists, and it obviously does not save it for later (unless you bookmark it). The implementation is open-source (MPL license), although Pocket itself is proprietary. Hotword detection is not absolutely necessary for browser functionality, yet I hear no chorus of complaints from Chrome users. Should Mozilla be prohibited from partnering with proprietary third-parties whether or not it benefits their users?

Hello is even less of an argument. Firefox Hello is a simple Javascript UI for the existing WebRTC spec supported by Firefox, Chrome, and Opera[1]. It allows people to communicate without having to set up accounts, sign-in somewhere, and works against the platform lock-in of proprietary services such as Facetime, Hangouts, and Skype. If it's disabled by default, the service becomes useless. My parents shouldn't have to enable it about:config for me to talk to them, nor should they have to download another plugin to use a technology built-in to the browser. I understand the security implications[2] in IP leakage[3], but I don't see a simple fix that doesn't neuter the functionality (although this comes close[4]). W3C has stated their position on fingerprinting[5], but at least Mozilla is actively working on the issue.

0: http://www.ghacks.net/2015/02/07/mozilla-starts-to-push-read...

1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/which-browsers-will-wor...

2: https://twitter.com/incloud/status/619624021123010560

3: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959893

4: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/statutory/

5: https://github.com/w3ctag/spec-reviews/blob/master/2015/05/f...

urda• 11 years ago

1) Open the menu

2) Click "Customize"

3) Drag pocket and / or hello from the tool bar into "Additional tools and features"

4) Take a breather, phew that wasn't too hard was it?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-firefox-contr...

justizin3• 11 years ago

I noticed this behavior when I fired up an older Mac I hadn't used in a year or so, it was refreshing that Flash always required click-to-activate, and I made this the setting on all my machines a while back and started suggesting to my friends to.

Some websites' video don't work as well, they have JS or CSS that interfere, or assume that you don't have flash installed, or retaliate as if you are an ad blocker, so I'm glad to see this is becoming more widespread, those problems may be fixed.

exodust7• 11 years ago

When is the formal EOL for Firefox? It's my primary browser, but some people hate it, so just thought I'd ask when the EOL for Firefox is?

Flash is never blocked for me in Firefox and never will be. Because a few months back I did this:

1. about:config 2. extensions.blocklist.enabled - 'false'

Job done. No more Mozilla annoyances between me and the content I wish to access. And yes, it was an annoyance because the link to "check for updates" in your message would not get me anywhere. That was a flaw in your strategy that I now suspect was deliberate. I really can't respect engineered annoyances that align with agendas rather than good UX.

I like Flash when it's done well. Raw performance and efficiency is one of the things I like about it. The powerful multimedia handling of everything from audio to video cannot be matched by HTML5. I'm an HTML/CSS/JS dev for my living for 20 years, that's how I know this to be true.

HTML5 video is cute. But it doesn't cut the mustard in all circumstances.

360 video, VR, and many other things will come along that are too much for web technologies to handle. Flash serves a useful purpose in allowing websites to cater to the most demanding cutting edge tech and content without needing the Firefoxes and Chromes of the world to keep up.

"closed source"; "battery drain"; "plugins are just bad".... oh cry me a river.

My comment has reached EOL.

nightpool• 11 years ago

Holy shit. Flash has over 34 CVEs in one week—and only because a prominent organization that was sitting on a bunch of them got hacked—and you call mozilla taking steps to protect the security and integrity of their customers an "engineered annoyance"?

Grow up.

JoshTriplett2• 11 years ago

extensions.blocklist.enabled - 'false'

Congratulations, you just left yourself open to malware masquerading as addons.

johnduhart• 11 years ago

I like Flash when it's done well. Raw performance and efficiency is one of the things I like about it.

This is some comedy gold.

tgb• 11 years ago

For what it's worth, the shumway racing AS3 demo appeared to work but froze all input like closing or switching tabs for me and I had to kill it with task manager. Windows 8.1, Firefox 39.0.

amyjess3• 11 years ago

To be clear, by "blocked" Flash we really mean enforced click-to-activate

For the record, I'm more than fine with that. In fact, I've used extensions to get that effect for years.

agumonkey3• 11 years ago

What made Flash so fast ? was it direct unsafe access to the metal or was there some black magic in their code ?

throwaway20483• 11 years ago

actionscript (the flash programming language) is pretty much the same as javascript, the main reason why flash is often a lot faster than html+js things in a browser is it is not constrained to a slow, broken DOM for building uis.

tracker1• 11 years ago

I don't know that it's particularly faster than what can/could be accomplished with svg + JavaScript ...

I think most of the speed as a plugin vs native html/svg/js is that you don't have the whole DOM to deal with (including reflows, etc), and that their ActionScript is a much smaller subset of a language than JS in the browser, AS3 changed things a bit though. Today with canvas and an audio api that mostly works, you can get the same.

What I really wish is that Adobe would create Flash-level tooling with outputs for HTML/canvas/js/web-audio and video.

mangeletti2• 11 years ago

Hi Mark,

Do you have any interest an organizing an effort, along with Facebook's Alex Stamos and other folks, to plan a formal EOL for Flash? Of course, the steps Mozilla and others have taken help, but perhaps a more organized movement could get other thought and market leaders on board, trigger higher rates of HTML5 adoption and foster the bits of remaining innovation that are needed to fully replace Flash on the web.

Also, does Firefox plan to address the concerns brought up about Hello, and, more importantly, Pocket?

brighteyes2• 11 years ago

They have already said that after the feedback they will make pocket into an addon (installed by default but easily removable like any addon).

yarrel• 11 years ago

Can you call for a formal EOL on HTML5 DRM as well, please?

JoshTriplett2• 11 years ago

As much as I'd like to see this, Mozilla doesn't have the necessary clout to do this when other browsers are adopting it.

geofft2• 11 years ago

That's completely technically meaningless without EOLing NPAPI, and Google's currently the only people brave enough to do that. Firefox's EME implementation is strictly less of a threat to your privacy than the current status quo, by design.

NPAPI has its own privacy and security and stability reasons to meet a swift doom, even independent of the DRM question.

natch• 11 years ago

The web page explains:

"To prevent these add-ons from running, click Restart Firefox."

Why doesn't the dialog box have that same explanation? Did you (mozilla) think the two button options "Restart Later" and "Restart Firefox" won't confuse people?

rorykoehler• 11 years ago

FWIW This is how I have all my browsers setup anyways. Autoplay ruined my web experience so I turn off all plugins and white list as necessary.

jordigh• 11 years ago

Is Shumway a possible replacement for Scratch 2's flash implementation? They seem to think that there are some flash things that just can't be done without flash:

    Unimplementable Features on iOS: Image effects for whirl, fisheye,
    mosaic, and pixelate. Sound and video input for loudness, video
    motion, and touching colors from the video.

https://github.com/LLK/scratch-html5

I really like Scratch, but it's a pity that it's implemented on a platform so many people think should no longer exist.

pcwalton2• 11 years ago

You should be able to implement those effects with either simd.js or a WebGL shader, no?

(Assuming you can get the pixel data; but getting the pixel data from HTML content is actually a security nightmare…)

drzaiusapelord• 11 years ago

I was advocating for this yesterday in /r/sysadmin and this morning it was a pleasant surprise to hear that this actually happened. I imagine you're getting all sorts of complaints from advertisers and others, but its the right move. The web is simply dangerous and having an unaccountable closed source binary happily running anything served to it is just crazy.

I'd love it if you kept it like this and implemented a flash whitelist function. Flash needs to be treated like Java: its legacy tech that should be used only via whitelisting. Google is too embedded into the marketing and advertising world to ever consider doing this in Chrome. Its really up to you guys, per usual, to save the web.

digi_owl5• 11 years ago

One slightly annoying thing i found right now is that if i have a plugin set as disabled in about:addons, it will not show up on the update checker found in the top link.

cpeterso7• 11 years ago

The (unprivileged) Plugin Check website can't detect disabled plugins because they don't show up in navigator.plugins. Ideally, Plugin Check should be an automatic check built into Firefox. The advantage of the Plugin Check website is that it works in any browser.

koonsolo5• 11 years ago

Hi Mark,

Technology should be replaced by better technology. To give you some background: I've written games for all kinds of platforms: PocketPC, Windows Mobile, (Desktop) Windows, Linux, OS X, Flash (AS3), HipTop, J2ME devices and some smaller proprietary devices.

Some of those platforms offer write once, run everywhere. On other platforms every device has it's own quirks and you have to test on every device and implement workarounds.

You might not like Flash, but it is great at running on every platform/browser with the same code base. If you test it on one platform, it runs on all others. (Adobe is also very good at keeping it backwards compatible)

Now, I ask you, what's the alternative for Flash? Does HTML5 offer write once, runs the same on every platform/browser(version!)? No it doesn't, and it never will. Even simple HTML pages are full of browser checking hacks.

Now, if you can offer a programming platform where the games I develop on, run exactly the same on every browser, on every platform, I have no problem killing Flash. But let's be honest here, only plugins can guarantee such a thing.

As to Alex Stamos, the top games on Facebook are all Flash. You know why? Because developers don't have to worry whether or not those games will run inside the users browser. Because once Flash is installed, they will run without issues. HTML5? No such guarantee.

So before you declare EOL, please have a proper alternative, where I don't have to pull my hair and cry all night because browser X on platform Y version Z seems to break the end boss of level 5 in my game because its implementation slightly differs from all the rest.

brighteyes2• 11 years ago

While I do understand where you are coming from - it can be more convenient to target a single implementation - the fact is that Flash has not been what you describe, for a while now. Flash officially announced it would no longer support Linux, and Flash is not usable in most mobile browsers either, for example.

Even plugins can't really get you what you want here. Yes, HTML5 has limitations, as you described, but plugins aren't the solution. HTML5 is closer, and moving in the right direction at least.

enraged_camel• 11 years ago

I think I'd rather play your game and have it break on the end boss of level 5 than risk having severe security vulnerabilities in my browser.

bobajeff3• 11 years ago

Flash isn't part of the Web. It's not vendor neutral.

If Adobe decides to deprioritise a platform that mean the users of that platform with experience less support in terms of bug fixes, performance and security. If Adobe decides not to support a platform period that means users of that platform are left without a means to access Flash content.

If you are a user this is unacceptable. More importantly these things have already happened.

krapp• 11 years ago

Fortunately, an alternative to Flash and HTML5 already exists.

Unfortunately, that alternative is Java applets.

liviu2• 11 years ago

Hi, while I got your point and mostly I agree with you, I just have a question.

Now when WebGL is widely adopted why you can create your games using that technology? Or even compile your C/C++ games with asm.js. I saw very nice demos in the past.

For simple 2D games (like most of the Flash games), I saw very nice Flash-friendly libraries like Phaser[0] (based on Pixi.js).

[0] https://phaser.io/examples

joeyespo• 11 years ago

Wow, these are my thoughts exactly, but haven't been able to put to word. Thanks for writing this.

baby3• 11 years ago

This is great. Let's continue: add Tree Style Tab natively

lucianp• 11 years ago

I second this! Tree Style Tab is one of the few addons that I cannot live without. Heck, it is one of the reasons why Firefox is my primary browser. This feature should be made native and the original developer should be rewarded somehow for his efforts.

Sanddancer2• 11 years ago

Why isn't Mozilla spending more time to ensure Firefox is using all of the security resources that the OS gives it? Things like ASLR still aren't enabled by default, let alone plugin sandboxing like what exists in Chrome. While Shumway would be nice, having a reliable, secure way to hook into native code would be a lot nicer.

jasonthevillain• 11 years ago

The next time this happens can you please disable it entirely?

The things on my site (video, some ads) that use flash will fall back nicely to HTML5 is Flash is disabled, as will most of the web. Click to activate is the worst of both worlds.

nkassis• 11 years ago

Anyone know if Google Finance has said anything about their charts moving away from Flash?

cbhl• 11 years ago

If you search for a stock symbol in Google Web Search (instead of Google Finance) you'll get a SVG-and-JavaScript chart that has fewer features.

If you don't need the specific features in the Google Finance chart, that might be a good alternative.

(Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on Google Finance. My own opinion, yada yada.)

Bahamut• 11 years ago

Looks like Chrome now deactivates Flash by default now too - it says "Adobe Flash Player was blocked because it is out of date" & I get directed to this link https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/6258784

Edit: Ah, looks like I needed to update Chrome with the fix.

erickhill• 11 years ago

I wonder how the ad networks/agencies will respond to this if it becomes the norm across future competing browsers?

Flash ads (including video) can be horrid on CPUs, but they also often have higher CPMs than static, "cheaper" ads. Firefox seems to be blocking flash entirely. They’re also doing it in a way that the ad networks can’t tell, unlike Chrome. In other words, if I disable Flash in Chrome, the ads normally fall back to (cheaper) non-flash ads. On Firefox, I’m getting blank gray boxes.

For sites that depend on advertising to survive, hopefully the ad networks will update their inventory with alternative non-intrusive ads a.s.a.p. so this type of (admittedly much needed) evolution doesn't suck too many content providers down.

Walkman• 11 years ago

Steve Jobs won finally.

milankragujevic• 11 years ago

If only Firefox actually supported my AMD APU, then I wouldn't have to use Flash for YouTube and such. I actually force YouTube to play using the Flash player, as with HTML5 the video freezes and is very choppy. My mother is using Linux Mint, and for her the reverse is true, Flash is horrible and HTML5 is smooth and fast.

edit: I use Windows 8.1.

nkurz2• 11 years ago

I find "Click to Play" makes for a better browsing experience, and think this is a fine move for Firefox.

Interestingly, Google Chrome recently moved in the opposite direction, and removed support for having Flash off by default and activating with a single click. Instead, they consider Flash to be "important plug-in content". While they allow you to have it off by default, rather than "click to play", they now require that you right click then pull down to "run this plugin" each time you want to activate: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/xPcpRB...

I presume this is because they want to discourage people from having Flash off by default, since this would mean they would miss too many Flash ads. I took this as an opportunity to try out some different browsers, and found that Opera met my needs slightly better than Firefox. If you are looking for an alternative to Firefox or Chrome, or just want to see what's out there, you might want to check it out too: http://www.opera.com/

ps. As an example of the new Google interface strategy, to show all the responses on the Google Chrome Help Forum link above rather than being forced to click on each one, you can press the 'o' key some random number of times until they appear: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gec-answers-f...

gmurphy2• 11 years ago

Chrome moved to context click + menu because left click is clickjackable, so doesn't help very much with the security issues.

nkurz2• 11 years ago

I've seen this argument, but don't believe that removing the option for click-to-play improves security. I'd could believe this theory if the default was simulataneously changed to have Flash default to off, but as it is, the result is that more users will choose to keep the default where Flash always on. Surely automatic activation is even less secure than a potentially hijackable click-to-play?

Manishearth3• 11 years ago

I've been click to play on Firefox for a long time now. Faster, less annoying ads (I am okay with nonannoying ads; they help pay for the site), and sites rarely need flash anyway. I think only Gmail and github (for click to copy) need it

msujaws• 11 years ago

Note, click-to-copy will eventually not need Flash :)

See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform...

nathanvanfleet• 11 years ago

Sounds nice, but sometimes I'm on a page in Safari (with Click To Flash active) and I can't get a page to load at all after "clicking to flash" once. I think there must be some additional flash file that I don't get the chance to click or some moment that passed so it can't load.

elchief• 11 years ago

If you want to make your Chrome Flash click-to-play:

Enter chrome://plugins/ in your address bar, find "Adobe Flash Player", uncheck "Always allowed to run".

You'll then have to right-click flash content to play it.

CodeSheikh• 11 years ago

Death to Flash.

DenisM• 11 years ago

So, my multi-file upload flash button stop working today? Bummer...

Any suggestions for a simple milt-file upload JS library? Something that works on new browsers, and falls back to flash on old browsers.

andyl• 11 years ago

I like the change. Firefox seems faster. Better to opt-in to Flash as-needed.

Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default

Related Stories