Mozilla Firefox Kills All Versions of Flash Player by Default
Just yesterday, the chief security officer at Facebook, Alex Stamos asked for the end for Adobe’s fragile and vulnerable software Flash Player after 400 GB cache of files was stolen by the spyware company Hacking Team. In another similar development, Mozilla has decided lead the way and set examples for others.
However, in the following tweet, Schmidt supported software company by saying that Firefox will resume Flash as soon as Adobe releases a better, secured version of the plugin with lesser vulnerabilities and that are not publicly known and open to exploitation.
To be clear, Flash is only blocked until Adobe releases a version which isn’t being actively exploited by publicly known vulnerabilities.
— Mark Schmidt (@MarkSchmidty) July 14, 2015
Mozilla had been severe on several software and plugins before that had the security issues. Some of the notable previously blocked plugins are Java and Adobe’s Flash, again. Flash had been repeatedly criticised for its vulnerabilities by many people including Apple Inc founder Steve Jobs, who explained why they don’t allow Adobe on Apple’s devices in his open letter called “Thoughts on Flash”. And now, the recent theft of files by the Hacking Team only highlight the factual information.
Big companies like Apple, YouTube, and now Facebook have condemned Flash citing its poor performance in the past few years. Chrome has developed an intelligent Flash pause to protect its users. Flash is only being used by the small web services and they too are expecting Flash to fizz out soon.
Most of these companies have opted for the superior HTML5 or are going for it.
Is it time for Flash to hang its boots? Or, Adobe should come with a new-big-bad version of the plugin? What do you think? Write your thoughts in comments.
Also See: Mozilla Firefox vs Microsoft Edge: Mozilla Bringing Windows 10 Version
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