Benjamin Smedberg, Firefox’s quality engineering manager, said Firefox is going to be an Adobe Flash-free environment in an article published on the company’s blog on July 20, 2016. More than an announcement, the article meticulously describes how the company is going to eliminate the plug-in little by little with dates and everything. Smedberg also said Mozilla was going to start using new APIs to replace the plug-in’s functions.
It is every tech savvy person’s nightmare when lending out their PC results in ten new plugins installed. In addition to female singles near your area, this malware, and an extensive variety of virus can get annoying or the user. In the past, these hated pieces of software transformed a dull internet-browsing experience into what people know today. They were great, but they usually created compatibility problems within the browser which resulted in random crashes.
Before them, people could not play videos or listen to music, so at the beginning, everybody loved these extensions and gladly installed them on their browsers, the list includes Adobe Flash Player, QuickTime Player and Java. Then the marketing nation attacked, and nothing was the same again. Thousands of plug-ins started to rain on people’s browsers with and without authorization, and the war on plug-ins began. A new cyber security branch was born led by blocks, but the conflict is about to come to a conclusion.
Firefox will get rid of all the plug-ins by early 2018
Smedberg said Mozilla had replaced many plug-ins with APIs that can do the same without the compatibility problems. By doing so, the company has improved the speed in which the browser loads pages, the general interacting velocity and the life battery of mobile devices. Now it’s the turn-off Adobe Flash Player to be gone from this world.
Mozilla will start by blocking specific content that is usually invisible to the user, and yet, the company estimates the measure will prevent 10% of the crashes and hang ups. Smedberg included a list of Flash content that is going to be replaced by HTML APIs, but this is only the beginning.
Next year, the company is going to stop the automatic reproduction of Flash plugin content, so the users can click on them if they want to see it. This measure will force websites and video game developers to switch to Adobe Primetime and Google Widevine as the primary tools to create video content. Mozilla is moving on to the future, and the developers have until 2018 when the company is going to stop supporting plugins for sound, including Silverlight and Java.
Browsers are evolving, and these changes were long overdue. The whole industry will have to adjust the pace or disappear before the unstoppable force of progress.
Source: Mozilla Blog