Mozilla disables Flash in Firefox by default from September

When released in September 2019, Firefox 69 will have the Flash plugin disabled by default, according to a message from Mozilla developers. It’s another move by Mozilla towards completely ending Flash support by 2020.

Disabling Flash in Firefox 69 by default, starting with the Nightly, is stated in a notice on Bugzilla. The public release of Firefox 69 is on Mozilla’s roadmap for September 3. Until now, it was only known that Mozilla would stop enabling the Flash plugin by default sometime in 2019.

Disabling it means that users will no longer be prompted to enable Flash, but it will still be possible in the settings. Firefox users can already choose ‘never activate’ in the settings, instead of the default ‘ask to activate’. Unlike Chrome, Firefox’s Flash is still an npapi plug-in, an outdated technology that carries risks, although the Firefox plug-in has been sandboxed on 64-bit Windows since version 62.

In early 2020, Mozilla will completely discontinue support for Flash in the consumer versions of Firefox. For the Firefox Extended Support Release, that support ends at the end of 2020. Once Adobe stops security updates for Flash, Firefox will refuse to load the plugin any longer, according to Mozilla’s roadmap.

Adobe will stop those security updates on January 1, 2021; From that moment on, Flash is end-of-life, Adobe announced in mid-2017. The software appeared in 1996 as Macromedia Flash and became popular as a web technology for games, sites and video, but it also had a long history of security vulnerabilities. There was also criticism of the impact on battery life, instability and performance, especially on mobile. Steve Jobs, among others, turned against Flash on mobile.