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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

#21

Post by derefr »

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…

As an alternative, rather than requiring that all Flash shims have some sort of screen real-estate of their own to overlay a click-to-play control onto, perhaps hidden embedded Flash (or Java, or ActiveX, or whatever) objects could request the browser to prompt for their activation with an information bar.

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

#22

Post by tallowen »

I think the real benefit here would be to block java plugins automatically. The current implementation blocks both (to the best of my understanding).

Not automatically loading java would be a great benefit to the majority of users. Its not used on nearly as many websites yet it is responsible for the lion's share of current security exploits.

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

#23

Post by padenot »

kogir wrote: post #19
padenot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

  I might be ok with a timeout - after 30 seconds of no 
  interaction from me, suspend the tab. Would that address
  your objection?
There has been experiments to do that (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=675539), and an (experimental) extension brings you this behavior (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dormancy/), but hasn't been updated in a while.

Actually, this completely unloads the page from memory, which is not exactly what you ask for.

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

#24

Post by electrotype »

Make this the default behavior if you want, but add a configuration option to change it.

In my opinion, there should always be a configuration option associated to a new feature/behavior like this!

Because in the end that's why I still use Firefox : I can configure it like I want!

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

#25

Post by keeperofdakeys »

The problem is some uses of flash doesn't put any flash controls on the webpage. Mainly for audio related uses, like audio players (mixcloud), or games (since html5 audio still has some work to be done). Chrome gets around this with an icon in the urlbar, and an option "Run all plug-ins this time". If firefox wants to make click-to-play the default option, I don't think this is going to cut it. The only two options they have are to only click-to-play visible plugins (but this is really hard to detect), or give a popup. The popup might work for most users, but some are just going to get confused. In fact, I don't know if most users will read the place-holder for click-to-play in general, or just go "why isn't youtube working".

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

#26

Post by simonbrown »

robryan wrote: post #20
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.

I assume you are suggesting CORS as an alternative. Unfortunately, some APIs (e.g. StackExchange) implement crossdomain.xml but not CORS.

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

#27

Post by ineedafresca »

Awesome. I hope the old adage good product wins is really true in the browser world. It was quite a trick to grab market share against IE back in the day, but now they are up against the google cash machine paying Adobe/Avast/ Real/etc. $3/download for chrome. Hard for the little non-profit that could to compete against that. We'll see.

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

#28

Post by atdt »

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.

Well, it's true that JavaScript- and Canvas- powered ads are harder to distinguish from legitimate web content. But the flip-side is that they're (re-)programmable using standard JavaScript APIs, and thus vulnerable to manipulation by browser extensions in a way that Flash never was, being a proprietary binary format.

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

#29

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#30

Post by RobAtticus »

alwold wrote: post #8

I didn't know Chrome already had the option to do click-to-play until I read this. Very cool, I'm turning it on now.

I turned it on a few weeks ago, and after a day or two white listing a few sites that I use often (Google Music, etc) I've found my browsing experience much more enjoyable. My computer as a whole seems snappier; although it could be placebo.
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