Firefox joins Facebook in pushing to kill Flash: is this the end of the plug-in?

4 months ago

Adobe Flash Player – the software plugin that is used to run some videos in web browsers – has been on the way out for some time.

Now that campaign is stepping up a notch thanks to Mozilla and Facebook.

Ever since Steve Jobs publicly listed his problems with the software in an open letter back in 2010, things have been on a downward spiral, not helped by a raft of security vulnerabilities. Jobs said at the time that Flash was the “number one reason Macs crash”, and the software regularly tops vulnerability lists.

Other firms have moved against it too: YouTube dropped Flash in favour of HTML5 at the beginning of this year, and Firefox has blocked it on other occasions in the past too.

Now, in the wake of Facebook’s new chief security officer, Alex Stamos saying that a date needs to be set to end Flash use because of its vulnerability to hackers, Mozilla has backed up the social network by blocking Flash by default in its Firefox web browser.

The firm’s Mark Schmidt was pretty clear on his thoughts in a tweet.

Though he did later move to clarify the move with another post.

Even Adobe themselves have stopped developing the software for mobile, making a finite kill seem inevitable, but it appears the software is being slowly weeded out of the web.

Firefox users now have to opt-in in order to use Flash, and even then are greeted with the warning message: “Flash is known to be vulnerable. Use with caution.”

Though there have been some minor reports of Spotify’s web player not working on Chrome – another anti-Flash browser – as the music streamer uses the Adobe software, in the grand scheme of things there shouldn’t be too much collateral. According to tech survey firm We3Techs, less than 11% of websites currently use Flash.

So although the game isn’t up just yet, Flash appears to be on something of a funeral march.