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Mozilla may make Flash click-to-play by default in future Firefox

arstechnica.com

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Re: Mozilla may make Flash click-to-play by default in future Firefox

#11

Post by noduerme »

For my money, they oughta make Canvas click-to-play as well, since the rendering speed in Firefox is unbelievably slow and the javascript behind it is so frequently written to hog up 100% of the CPU it's hard to even know what you're looking at if you accidentally stumble across an HTML5 page in Firefox, before your system grinds to a complete halt. It's funny how people blame Flash for slow websites when what they should really blame is bad coding practice, which can just as easily show up in JS (and does). To take it further, it's pretty rare for Flash code to bootstrap a huge set of libraries to do some petty effect - and if it does, the plugin doesn't freeze the browser preload while waiting on them. Whereas a 150k JS file that includes jquery and a bunch of other junk which probably isn't necessary (but makes coding some effect that much easier for bad programmers) can bring a website to its knees before the first line of text is delivered in the browser.

Again, don't blame the tools; blame the tools who use them.

Re: Mozilla may make Flash click-to-play by default in future Firefox

#13

Post by rdw »

Great move. I am reminded of Apple's recent Java update[1], which turns Java off by default, and disables it again after a period of disuse. It moves the security threat into phishing rather than drive-by territory, a definite improvement.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3834267

Re: Mozilla may make Flash click-to-play by default in future Firefox

#15

Post by CoreDumpling »

I welcome this move, despite the possibility of some fallout from the change. It'll be painful, but even as someone who once made a living writing ActionScript, I have to say that Flash is sufficiently annoying and insecure that it really needs to be phased out.

In the short term, this will probably cause some breakage in certain sites that try to use Flash "transparently" and "unobtrusively" for things like LSOs, drag-and-drop, clipboard access, or cross-domain XHR. These are already problematic with Flashblock installed though -- Pandora, for instance, refuses to load and there is nothing available to click-to-play since that particular Flash object is hidden.

Hopefully this will light a fire under those sites and get them to update to the appropriate HTML5 methods of doing these things (local storage, WebSockets, etc.), just like how Java applets that were used for such things have been largely phased out. Until then, however, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them simply inform you not to use Firefox to visit.

Re: Mozilla may make Flash click-to-play by default in future Firefox

#16

Post by padenot »

kogir wrote: post #14

This is great, really, but I'd like to see something more aggressive: Non-foreground tabs should be completely suspended - plugins, JavaScript, media, you name it - unless they specifically request and are granted permission to run in the background.

Quite a lot of webpages need js to initialize themselves, these days, and I want them to load in background when I middleclick on a link. You probably want (at least some) websites to perform XHR when not focused (to update a news stream or something). I find an opt-in behavior on such a common feature a bit to hard, as a lot of website rely on that.

setTimout and friends are throttled (at least in Firefox) to fire at most once every second, so you won't burn your battery having a graphic demo in the background.

Re: Mozilla may make Flash click-to-play by default in future Firefox

#18

Post by sjs »

krakensden wrote: post #10
potatolicious wrote: post #7

I am so happy that I can barely contain myself. Hopefully this means Flash will now be used for important things, instead of shoving ads in my face that I can't dismiss, and follow my scroll bar.

You say that now, but just wait until they're written in JS+Canvas and enormously more difficult to block.

I don't have any trouble blacklisting domains for JS with current browser extensions. Why would it suddenly get more difficult?

Re: Mozilla may make Flash click-to-play by default in future Firefox

#19

Post by kogir »

padenot wrote: post #16
kogir wrote: post #14

This is great, really, but I'd like to see something more aggressive: Non-foreground tabs should be completely suspended - plugins, JavaScript, media, you name it - unless they specifically request and are granted permission to run in the background.

Quite a lot of webpages need js to initialize themselves, these days, and I want them to load in background when I middleclick on a link. You probably want (at least some) websites to perform XHR when not focused (to update a news stream or something). I find an opt-in behavior on such a common feature a bit to hard, as a lot of website rely on that. setTimout and friends are throttled (at least in Firefox) to fire a…

Actually, I'd only white-list Gmail and maybe Twitter. I'd prefer it if most site just served HTML to begin with.

I run with JavaScript and Cookies disabled unless white-listed, and just leave the majority of pages that won't load. Techcrunch, Engadget, and most news sites are so much faster without JS.

I might be ok with a timeout - after 30 seconds of no interaction from me, suspend the tab. Would that address your objection?

Re: Mozilla may make Flash click-to-play by default in future Firefox

#20

Post by robryan »

CoreDumpling wrote: post #15

I welcome this move, despite the possibility of some fallout from the change. It'll be painful, but even as someone who once made a living writing ActionScript, I have to say that Flash is sufficiently annoying and insecure that it really needs to be phased out. In the short term, this will probably cause some breakage in certain sites that try to use Flash "transparently" and "unobtrusively" for things like LSOs, dr…

Cross domain XHR shouldn't be an issue as you only really need flash for it in IE 6 and 7.
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