According to Mozilla’s plugin roadmap, the firm planned to disable Flash by default in Firefox sometime this year. Now, a new bug filing has revealed that the plugin will be disabled as of Firefox 69 which is due for release on September 3, 2019. Mozilla will disable Flash beginning with the Nightly builds before it works its way down to the Stable channel.
The disabling of Flash comes in anticipation of Adobe ending support for its Flash plugin at the end of 2020. Mozilla has said that it will completely remove Flash support for consumer versions of Firefox in early 2020, while the Extended Support Release (ESR) version will have support until the end of the year. In 2021, Mozilla has said that Firefox will refuse entirely to load the plugin due to a lack of security updates from Adobe.
Aside from the occasional Flash-based online game, is Flash even a thing these days? Do any of you still use it on a regular basis?
I can report still using it as I work with a variety of vSphere setups of which some require the use of the Flash version. That makes it probably every day or so that I have to load the Flash version. I don’t foresee all of those going away by 2020 unfortunately.
Doesn’t seem to be an issue.
https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2017/08/goodbye-vsphere-web-client.html
Well, if you can choose to upgrade all the systems you have to deal with, yes its not a problem. If you can’t due to budget, admin, time, legacy blah blah… Then no you can not. And not having access to flash would be a problem.
Adobe IS going to end support for Flash at that time – so there is that. (AIR will still be developed – so there may be alternative ways to run existing Flash content)
Oh well. I don’t have any sympathy when they went with a commercial product.
The web client is missing features around networking and networking security (aka NSX). Don’t remind me I have to manually whitelist Flash in 2019 on Ubuntu Linux.
I know I don’t use it every day what about VMware ESXi ?
When things fail or I need to fix something before adding a host to vSphere I do use it sometimes.
Does VMware have any plans for that ?
Flash… something from prehistory, right?
Flash, ahah. He’s the saviour of the universe!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS4_Z84-rRE
Nice videoclip, didn’t know that one 🙂
Where I work, we have a web interface to some hardware that still expects Flash for one of the displays. Hopefully the vendor will do away with the Flash requirement, but I am not holding my breath. Their interface still doesn’t work reliably under any browser other than Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, we are stuck with the hardware for the foreseeable future.
Langalf,
Same here, Native HTML5 support is still uncommon for hardware access, plugins are the norm. I don’t mind mozilla disabling things by default, but I despise mozilla becoming a walled garden that rules by authority instead of taking the high road and allowing users to choose what they need for themselves.
I recommend trying a different browser:
https://www.palemoon.org
Much better to use old Firefox code supported by a much much smaller development team.
It’s not even up to Mozilla – Adobe is not going to support Flash after 2020.
Yep, HBO Nordic requires flash so if you are a Game of Thrones/Westworld junkie and watch on your computer you have a tough choice to make. Hopefully they will update before the end of the year or I have to think about cancelling (and losing out on some favorite shows).
I had to make sure flash works without too many problems for someone in the family. She likes to play certain games on facebook and I am not in the position to say she shouldn’t. (I check that updates are done and nothing abnormal is running after her husband died a year ago).
Captcha and many many login interface are still written in Flash. No Flash, no login possible.
I haven’t had Flash installed on my system at all for over two years now and I haven’t seen any captchas or login interfaces that require it. What ancient sites are these you are referring to?
Same here. Chrome’s had it hard-disabled for quite a while now actually, by virtue of not supporting the old plugin API anymore (and Adobe choosing not to provide Flash for the new one). Given Chrome’s market share, I think sites that actually use Flash for this type of thing still are already an endangered species, and Firefox disabling Flash by default is going to hasten their demise more than it’s going to cause trouble for users.
ahferroin7,
There are two sides to the story though, for corporate and/or other kinds of users who still depend on plugins (I don’t depend on flash, but I do depend on others) don’t have much choice in the matter, they’re going to end up mandating the use of IE again, which is kind of a regression to the old days.
As someone that works in the Enterprise world I don’t have any sympathy. Enterprise crap always seems to be such garbage. Paying great sums for this shit? Are you kidding me?
Don’t worry, today’s JavaScript is almost as bad as Flash was at its worst.
pmac,
As a user, currently my biggest gripe with HTML5 is autoplay and the inability to disable it. It’s such a simple thing, and yet not having control over videos starting is such a frustrating nuisance. When a site starts auto playing a video on a page that I wanted to read, I have to hunt down the video to hit pause on it. I’ve already set “media.autoplay.enabled” to false, but many sites have managed to bypass mozilla’s faulty implementation and they never fixed it as far as I can tell. There were legacy plugins to do just that, but since mozilla has disabled them, all of the new extensions using approved APIs only seem to work by modifying the DOM on a site by site basis rather than actually truly disabling all unrequested playback within the browser.
I’d be very thankful for anyone who can recommend a permanent solution to this.
Use Stylish and modify your DOM on a per site basis
Kochise,
That’s exactly the approach I don’t want though. Patching individual websites is the approach that many extensions have resorted to, but authors need to constantly monitor website changes or the patches will become stale. It would be far more effective for the browser to ignore non-user initiated playback to begin with. Alas I think the problem may be that mozilla’s newest APIs don’t give plugin developers the access they need to block autoplay.
Welcome to JavaScript, where the script has complete control over the DOM and significant parts of the Window.
This makes it hard to distinguish an actual click without breaking smartphones and Smart TVs and whatnot.
Are we missing ActionScript (Flash) which was constrained to a single DOM node?
BTW I believe Flash was crap, but the concept of ActionScript was decent. Keep all the visual effects in one DOM node.
IIRC media.autoplay.enabled is deprecated, and theres a new setting (can’t remember what) that has also has a UI exposed in the nightlies, and that UI should be coming to release soon.
For what it’s worth, I use the “Disable HTML5 Autoplay” extension by Afnan Khan, and that seems to work really well.
YMMV of course.
Drumhellar,
Thanks for the suggestion, however I tried installing it and it didn’t work for me on the news/video websites I tried. I believe that like other FF extensions, it may be using the DOM patching method hand crafted to specific websites that the author uses. It probably works some times but has to be updated to keep up with website changes, and I think it explains why the user reviews are so mixed.
I suspect a permanent fix would either require mozilla to block autoplay itself, or to give plugin authors additional access to the browser internals which they’ve stripped away in modern APIs rendering plugins less useful.
The code to stop autoplay already exists in firebox since it blocks HTML5 media from playing in background tabs, the only problem is that firefox automatically invokes the autoplay once the tab is foregrounded instead of keeping it blocked&paused.
I use “open in background” quite a bit, sometimes opening up dozens of links in the background, but if any of those pages have HTML5 autoplay media while I quickly browse through the tabs with the keyboard, I can end up with several tabs simultaneously playing unrequested media in the background. Ugh! This is completely un-user-friendly and I have to go and find all the embedded media playing to stop them before I can continue browsing in peace.
Sorry for preaching to the audience, I’m just at my wits end with not being able to block HTML5 autoplay like we could with flash especially as more and more media websites become guilty of it.
Another nuisance I am seeing more of is websites that use javascript to popup fixed position DIVs as the user mouses out of the browser window. I don’t know if the browser can do anything about those. With rich interactive capabilities of modern browser, I guess we have to take the bad with the good.
That’s too bad. It seems to work with me pretty well.
There’s also this:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1238033
It covers the new autoplay settings in about:config (Those that should soon have a UI for them).
Drumhellar,
Thank you for mentioning this, that works at least with a lot of the sites I have trouble with. Others (including youtube, which has it’s own option to turn off autoplay) are still bypassing it somehow, and I suspect more sites will bypass it over time if it doesn’t get completely fixed, but after all these years this is progress. Thanks again!
The company I used to work at until last year has the user and admin GUI fully in flash.
It is a very advanced and powerfull tool for mobile network operators but our clients were getting worried that no conversion to modern technologies was envisionned.
There were talks that eventually the UI should be rewritten but no development in 2018…
Pay me $200,000 and I’d do it in 6 months. 🙂
kwan_e,
Man, you are well paid. I’d do it for $40,000 and we’d both loose the bid to offshore devs who offer to do it the cheapest because time and time again this is exactly what happens. Just once I’d like to have a client where money is not an issue, haha.
Really, for many of my clients that money is not the main problem, they can afford your $40,000 with not that much trouble, the real question is if they MUST pay that value. If they can pay less, they will do, does not matter if it is $40,000 , $10,000 or $1,000. Capitalism at its best, even though some stupid racist, supremacist bigots would call it a product of socialist minds.
acobar,
Yeah, you’re right. I’d say it depends on the market. Many of my clients are struggling because amazon is eating everyone’s lunch in ecommerce. With about 50% of the market and growing, selling independently is becoming a less and less viable strategy for small businesses. I fear that we’re going to end up in a scenario similar to the credit card duopoly where in theory you could compete against visa&mastercard, but in practice you’ll end up loosing most of your businesses if you don’t partner with them since amazon will control access to the market.
This is why I’m currently trying to execute an exit strategy and steering more towards AI, but even there I’ll be competing against corporations with unbelievably deep pockets while here I am struggling to keep up with the costs of living. I need to be hooking up with bigger fish. Anyone here aspire to make something big and can afford to fund it for several years? Haha.
To: Alfman 2019-01-14 2:28 pm EST
Hum, take a look on “https://dilbert.com/?post_index=3&series_count=0&starting_point=6”
By the way, while you are at it, don’t forget to add on all components logic for strikes for better work conditions, pay raise, provisions for better oil and parts and more rest paid hours.
Because if we don’t do it we are going to be toast very soon !! 😉
$200,000 is well beyond my normal pay. May as well ask for the impossible for something that will never happen 🙂
I think anyone here could probably do a better job in 6 months for that kind of money than the army of consultants or offshore devs they hastily hire at the last minute to try and clean up their mess.
Oh, and I’m talking in Australian dollars.
kwan_e,
So true, and yet even at that I still loose a lot of projects to these offshore teams purely because they come in lower than me. Most prospective clients will say it outright: they went with someone cheaper. I suppose that’s capitalism at work, but it’s disheartening to compete on price with such high cost of living differentials at play.
Yeah, I’m guilty of US-centric assumptions when it comes to things like money. Looks like 1 USD = 1.39 AUD
You are not guilty of US-centric assumptions Alfman, the “$” symbol ALWAYS means USD in the international context, and we are not in an Australian website here but an international one. The OP just mixed up his context.
While I have no problems with Americans assuming American defaults, I think it’s reasonable for anyone to assume the defaults of their country of residence because no one outside of the US think in US-centric terms in day to day communications.
If you go into an international forum, you shouldn’t assume national defaults if they happen to conflict with international defaults.
I was thinking the same. I have found plenty of clients who would prefer not to offshore though. They are out there.
CaptainN-,
You are right. I’m technically a green card holder living in the US, so I don’t know that I have a moral standing to complain, but I’ve seen some US companies/owners getting US contracts only for them to have the work done offshore. I know I mentioned this on osnews before, but I know someone who hired one of these companies and they had no idea the work was being done in india until I informed her of unexpected traffic coming in from india. Only then did the company disclose that the work was being offshored.
Unrelated: I remember a story where a software developer offshored all their job functions to a chinese firm and simply paid with his own salary:
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/us-software-developer-busted-employer-outsourcing-job-china/story?id=18230346
He may have gotten away with it longer if he had practiced more operational security.
The customers were right to be worried. The writing has been on the wall for years. But typical mismanagement of a company. I see it so often it blows my mind.
Good luck staying in business.
Sadly, at this very moment, I am installing an application which is still flash based. (software to run a GED testing center)
Just had time to check OSNews while waiting for downloads to finish.
How serendipitous this news item was.
If it’s a new app – why not port it to AIR?
It sounds more like he is an end user of an app.
Just last night I was working on a Prezi and throwing together a video on Kizoa. Prezi classic is much more feature complete/flexible then Prezi Next so I am still using Flash there. Also, I have previously paid for my Kizoa account to have a quick video maker that requires minimal skill. Hopefully Kizoa will switch to HTML5 at some point, but I haven’t seen anything moving it in that direction, and Prezi Next really isn’t very good at this point. This is the problem, Flash became so common that it takes a lot of effort to replace it properly.
Who uses Prezi anyway? “Excuse me, I need an internet connection to make my slide-deck work….”
Be a professional and arrive with a stick that has your presentation inside and with a laptop just in case. I once had to present in a room where they had only a projector with a VGA cable laying on the table, and my sister once had to present in a conference room in the basement of a hotel with no cell reception and a flaky WiFi network.
BTW apologies for the tone of this comment. It was not intentional. I just hate those apps which will lock your files behind a URL for no good reason.
I converted a popular kids comic maker from Flash to HTML5 last year – it’s still built using Flash (er, now called Animate) for asset production – but the entire app runtime is now a combination of CreateJS (canvas) and React. http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/Comix/
My bank finally stopped using Flash for displaying/printing credit card statements online.
Plot twist: they are using Silverlight.
Nah, they switched to password-protected PDFs. The Flash applet was basically just a “secure” PDF viewer.
I just tried to login and found that osnews now requires a recaptcha?!? Please, as a long time fan of osnews, I beg you don’t make this so! Google sometimes won’t display the captcha for it’s own users (ie google/gmail users), but for those of us who deliberately avoid google’s services, they display them every time and increase the difficulty such that maybe once a month I can’t even pass the recapcha after several minutes of submitting answers. I’ve had to give up buying products some days because google’s recaptcha wouldn’t let me in.
Not only is recaptcha is a usability nightmare at times, but it also helps google track us on osnews without a way to opt out. Osnews isn’t just a random website oblivious to the privacy issues involved, you guys know this is a concern for privacy conscious tech users, please try to find a different solution, Really I’m sure many others including myself wouldn’t mind helping to find a better solution that doesn’t involve letting google snoop on your traffic.
What is osnews’ official position on this? It is important to me.
Don’t log out. 😛