Yesterday, the Firefox team disabled the Adobe Flash plugin by default in Firefox Nightly 69, which will be eventually deprecated as per Mozilla’s Plugin Roadmap for Firefox. Users can still activate Flash on certain sites if they want to, through the browser settings. Flash support will be completely removed from the consumer versions of Firefox by early 2020. The Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) will continue to support Flash till its end-of-life in 2020.
Why Mozilla has decided to disable Adobe Flash?
In recent years, we have seen a huge growth in web open standards like HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly. These technologies now come with various capabilities and functionalities for which we used to have plugins. Now, browser vendors prefer to integrate these capabilities directly into browsers and deprecate plugins. Hence, back in 2017, Adobe announced that along with their technology partners, Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook, it is planning to end-of-life Flash. It also added that by the end of 2020, it will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player and encouraged content creators to migrate any of their content which is in Flash format into new open formats.
Following this all the five partners announced their plan of action. Apple already did not supported Flash on iPhone, iPad, and iPod. For Mac users, Flash did not come pre-installed since 2010 and it was by default off if users decided to install it. Facebook announced that they are supporting game developers to migrate their Flash games to HTML5. Google will disable Flash by default in Chrome and remove it completely by the end of 2020. Microsoft also announced that they will phase out Flash from Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer, eventually leading to the removal of Flash from Windows entirely by the end of 2020.
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