Mozilla has announced that it will remove support for Flash with the release of Firefox 85. That version of Firefox is set to rollout to users on 26 January 2021 with the Nightly arriving today and the Beta on 14 December 2020. Today’s reminder comes on the same day that Firefox 83 was released with improved SpiderMonkey performance.
It’s no secret that Mozilla has been looking to remove Flash support from its browser. Last year, we reported that Firefox 69 would come with Flash disabled by default and before that Firefox 47 set the plug-in to click-to-activate and Firefox 52 removed support for non-Flash NPAPI plug-ins.
While 26 January 2021 marks the date of the release of the first version of Firefox without Flash support, the plug-in will actually stop working on 12 January 2021 when it reaches its end-of-life.
Adobe Flash Player was first released 24 years ago in 1996 and powered games and video content until HTML5 came along about a decade ago. Since the introduction of HTML5, game developers and online videos have moved away from Flash. The two main benefits of moving to HTML5 is security and performance as not everyone kept their Flash installs up-to-date nor did it perform well on other operating systems such as Linux.