Firefox to Fully Drop Flash Support by the End of 2020
Mozilla has decided to remove support altogether for Flash
from its Firefox browser by December 2020, and updated the release schedule of
the releases that will slowly integrate this important change.
The decision to drop Flash from browsers and operating
systems was taken a long time ago, but many websites still rely on this
antiquated technology. Flash was difficult to maintain, and new security
problems were discovered regularly. It took companies and developers many years
to reach this point.
According to a new schedule posted by Mozilla, the
deprecation of Flash in Firefox started in June 2016 by disabling the plugin
and requiring users to activate it manually. In 2019, Firefox 69 removed the
“Always Activate” Flash option, so all users were required to set
permissions when using a Flash-enabled website.
As it stands, Adobe will completely stop shipping security
updates for Flash at the end of 2020. In December 2020, Flash support will be
completely removed from the consumer version of Firefox.
“Plugins are a security and performance problem for
Firefox users,” says Mozilla.
“NPAPI plugins are an obsolete technology, and Mozilla has been moving
toward a Web which doesn’t need plugins.
The last remaining NPAPI plugin, Adobe Flash, has announced an
end-of-life plan.”
Users of Beta and Nightly versions of Firefox will see these
changes much earlier, as the features are pushed upstream.
Starting in 2021, websites using Flash will have problems
displaying that content to users, including Firefox.
The removal and replacement of Flash is actually a
collaboration between Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, allowing
all of them to be ready in time with their browsers and OS implementations.