Dive Brief:
- Mozilla announced this week that it is discontinuing support for Flash, Adobe’s troubled multimedia player.
- Plagued with security and stability challenges, in May Google also announced it was ending Flash support for its Chrome browser, hoping to completely rid itself of Flash by early next year.
- Benjamin Smedberg, manager of Firefox quality engineering at Mozilla, said in a company announcement that Mozilla plans to slowly end support for Flash within its Firefox web browser. In August, Firefox will block some Flash content unessential to user experience, but will continue to support "legacy Flash content," the company said.
Dive Insight:
Phasing out Flash "will bring Firefox users enhanced security, improved battery life, faster page load, and better browser responsiveness," Smedberg said.
Adobe Flash has had its fair share of issues. In December, Adobe released an update correcting 19 critical bugs. A few days later, on Jan. 1, another critical patch was released that corrected problems loading Flash in embedded applications. The January 1 emergency patch ended a rough year for Flash. Adobe had to fix three zero-day exploits early in 2015, and addressed 79 security holes in an update, in addition to other patches throughout the year.
That still didn’t solve all the problems, however. In April, Adobe issued an emergency update to Flash after a flaw that allowed hackers to circulate ransomware to Microsoft Windows users was discovered.
"Plugins often introduce stability, performance and security issues for browsers," wrote Smedberg.
"This is not a trade-off users should have to accept."
