Cyber Security

Firefox 69 to Disable Adobe Flash by Default

January 14, 2019

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Mozilla will soon disable Adobe Flash by default in Firefox, the first step toward completely removing support for the plugin in the browser.

The change will be initially made in Firefox 69 Nightly, and will then get through the entire release cycle, the Internet organization says.

“We are now scheduled to completely disable Flash in Firefox 69 which moves to the Stable release on August 3rd,” Mozilla notes on the browser’s roadmap page.

In July 2017, Adobe announced plans to completely kill Flash and stop providing security updates for it by the end of 2020.

The company’s decision was motivated by the large number of Critical vulnerabilities found in the plugin over the past several years, including flaws that were being actively exploited in malicious attacks.

Companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla fully backed Adobe’s decision to end Flash, and support for the plugin has been gradually deprecated from numerous popular products.

With the release of Firefox 55 in August 2017, Mozilla made Flash click-to-activate by default, requiring users to select which sites they wanted to activate the plugin on.

Now, the company is ready to move forth with the deprecation of support for Flash, and wants to disable it by default before the end of the year.

Early next year, Flash support will be completely removed from consumer versions of Firefox, though it will remain in the Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) until the end of 2020.

“When Adobe stops shipping security updates for Flash at the end of 2020, Firefox will refuse to load the plugin,” Mozilla notes on the Firefox plugins roadmap.

While Flash continues to be used in numerous applications and websites, developers and content creators are encouraged to migrate from Flash to open standards such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly, which are already supported by all major web browsers.