There"s been a lot of concerns lately over the safety of browsing websites that support third party plugin software. That"s been especially true of the Java software, which has been discovered to have a number of security holes.
This week, Mozilla announced a change in its previous plugin software setup for its Firefox web browser. In a post on its blog, Michael Coates, Mozilla"s director of security assurance, stated:
Previously Firefox would automatically load any plugin requested by a website. Leveraging Click to Play Firefox will only load plugins when a user takes the action of clicking to make a particular plugin play or the user has previously configured Click To Play to always run plugins on the particular website.
Click To Play is a list of plugins that Firefox blocks from running on the browser. Under the new system, Firefox will soon block all plugins from automatically running, with the exception of the current version of Flash. Coates cited both performance and security issues as the reasons for this new system.
Once the final implementation of this new system is put in place, Firefox will automatically block the running of plugins such as Java, Acrobat Reader and Microsoft"s Silverlight plugin, even if they are updated to current versions by their respective companies.
Source: Mozilla | Image via Mozilla