According to Mozilla’s plugin roadmap, the firm planned to disable Flash by default in Firefox sometime this year. Now, a new bug filing has revealed that the plugin will be disabled as of Firefox 69 which is due for release on September 3, 2019. Mozilla will disable Flash beginning with the Nightly builds before it works its way down to the Stable channel.
The disabling of Flash comes in anticipation of Adobe ending support for its Flash plugin at the end of 2020. Mozilla has said that it will completely remove Flash support for consumer versions of Firefox in early 2020, while the Extended Support Release (ESR) version will have support until the end of the year. In 2021, Mozilla has said that Firefox will refuse entirely to load the plugin due to a lack of security updates from Adobe.
NPAPI plugins such as Flash have posed a security and performance problem for Firefox users and Mozilla has described them as obsolete and that it wants to move to a web that doesn’t need plugins, one primarily powered using web technologies such as HTML5. Since June 2016, Mozilla has gradually been phasing out Flash usage in its browser. In Firefox 47 it made Flash click-to-activate, then in Firefox 52, it removed support for non-Flash NPAPI plugins.
Source: Ghacks
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