Mozilla has blocked Adobe Flash from running in its Firefox browser to prevent security vulnerabilities from affecting its users. Firefox is the third most used web browser (behind Chrome and Safari), and is available for Linux, Mac, Windows, and Android devices.
As of Monday night, Firefox blocks Adobe Flash by default, and can only be used by granting individual exceptions when visiting web sites that use Flash.
Firefox blocks Adobe Flash Add-On in browsers.
When attempting to enable the Flash plugin in the Firefox Add-On panel, you are notified that Flash Player “has been blocked for your protection.” The block by Firefox followed a statement by Facebook’s chief security officer calling for Adobe to kill off the Flash standard they’ve been trying to sustain for the last decade. On Sunday, Alex Stamos tweeted “It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day.” Stamos has been the CSO at Facebook since June, coming over from Yahoo where he served in a similar capacity for over a year.
via Twitter (@alexstamos)
Flash has a horrible track record when it comes to security, with over 508 security vulnerabilities discovered in the last 10 years alone. Over the past week additional security vulnerabilities in the Flash software had been uncovered by Hacking Team, a European security firm hired by developers to find exploits in computer software. This fueled the calls for Adobe to kill Flash once and for all.
At one point in the early 2000s Flash was everywhere on the web, but today it is used on less than 11% of websites according to W3Techs. The functionality that Flash used to provide has been replaced by new HTML5 coding standards. YouTube, Facebook, and many other internet giants have all made the switch to HTML video players, away from the Flash Player platform that used to power the web.
Could this be the end for Adobe Flash? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
