Firefox Continues Deprecation of Flash with “Click-To-Activate” Default Behavior in 2017
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Firefox Continues Deprecation of Flash with “Click-To-Activate” Default Behavior in 2017

Browsers encouraging move to HTML5 and modern web technologies.

Adobe Flash was once the king of the Web. It enabled all sorts of flashy and fancy experiences that native web technologies couldn’t offer. But now with the advances of HTML5, CSS3, and dozens of other web improvements, Flash has become more of a black sheep.

It’s no secret that Flash has been a constant source of security vulnerabilities – in just the past two years Flash has had over 500 CVE-assigned security issues (CVE, or Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, is a reference of publically known software vulnerabilities which pose security issues).

Flash is also an issue for performance and stability. That’s why every major browser is slowing dropping support for the vulnerable, crash-prone, and memory hogging plugin.

Mozilla just announced the next stage in their plan to remove Flash from their Firefox Browser. Starting in August, Firefox will begin blocking certain Flash content that is “not essential to the user experience”. This will primarily be Flash content being used for device-fingerprinting or as supercookies, which are both invasive behaviors that de-anonymize users.

In 2017 Firefox will default to “click-to-activate” for all Flash content, which replaces the content with a placeholder that only loads with explicit confirmation from the user.

Google’s Chrome browser is taking similar action.  Before the end of this year Chrome will also enable “click-to-activate” behavior for all Flash content. While they have not announced any specifics dates for this, they have put forth a proposal to do this sometime in Q4 of this year. Only the global top ten sites for Flash usage (which includes Facebook, Twitch.TV, and Amazon) would be put into a “white list” that would continue to automatically run Flash.  The privacy-focused browser Brave also has a plan for ending Flash support.

Click-to-activate is currently optional behavior in most browsers. If you have a minute we encourage you to turn on this behavior for all plugins now – it will improve your computer’s performance and help keep you safe. Here’s how you do it in Firefox, and Chrome.

The “end of Flash” has been talked about for years, so you would think most of the major sites have already moved on. But rebuilding apps and systems is difficult and expensive, which is why so many are holding onto Flash. This is why it’s been necessary for browsers to introduce these multi-step plans to discourage and eventually discontinue Flash – they understand change takes time, but it can’t take forever. Even Adobe has acknowledged that Flash has had its heyday, so hopefully there won’t be any hard feelings.