Mozilla will make Flash content in Firefox click-to-play starting next year

Starting next year, Mozilla will make all Flash content on sites ‘click-to-play’. The browser builder has announced this. From now on, Mozilla will start blocking Flash elements that users cannot see.

By blocking Flash content that is out of view of users, Mozilla hopes to improve the number of Flash plug-in crashes and the battery life of the browser on laptops, the browser builder writes. Mozilla recommends sites that rely on Flash to quickly switch to HTML techniques for displaying the same elements, often videos or games.

Firefox supports plugins such as Silverlight and Java until early 2018. Mozilla has not announced that it will stop supporting Flash altogether. Flash has been around for twenty years and has been used less in recent years for displaying videos, for example.

Google will make all Flash elements on a page click-to-play this year, the search giant said earlier. Safari will do that starting in version 10, and Microsoft will begin freezing Flash in Edge this summer.