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

arstechnica.com

61–70 of 121 posts

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

#62

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 s…

I wish I had more upvotes to give you. And let's not forget WebGL, as of today, 99% of the WebGL stuff is a sure way to have the fan spin to a million rpms on my laptop and blow out my battery.

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

#63

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…

>already problematic with Flashblock installed though -- Pandora, for instance, refuses to load

Not if you whitelist it at Tools > Add-ons > Extensions > Flashblock > Preferences.

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

#64

Didn't IE try this and developers got around it by using Javascript to embed flash? http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9046245/Microsoft_dro... Turns out Microsoft did it because of patent issues.

The plug-in was still loaded and executed. It is just the interaction with the plug-in that required an extra click.

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

#65
post #64

Didn't IE try this and developers got around it by using Javascript to embed flash? http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9046245/Microsoft_dro... Turns out Microsoft did it because of patent issues.

The plug-in was still loaded and executed. It is just the interaction with the plug-in that required an extra click.

Yea but I don't recall anyone liking that interaction pattern.

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

#66

Here's another suggestion: how about an invisible "volume bar" that shows itself in each tab that is currently playing music?

This has been suggested often (and would be a wonderful feature). IIRC it's impossible currently due to the fact that flash runs as a single process and so you can only control the volume of all flash movies, not individual ones.

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

#67

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…

To take care of the invisible Flash object problem, Firefox could copy what Chrome does for Java applets and have a bar pop up at the top of the whole page, asking if you want to allow Flash to run on the site in question.

[deleted]

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

#68
post #61

Great! I'm just wondering why it took them so long: Opera has had this built-in for ages.

I think the point of the article is "by default". I don't know about Firefox but chrome has plug-in on demand as well. On linux, I have plugin on demand enabled in Opera, however on windows I have it disabled due to it's inability to start hidden flash. For example on Soundcloud. Maybe there's an action for enabling plug-in on demand that I could put to shortcut but I never got around to look into it. Anyway, flash on windows is just fine ...when not counting the adobe vulnerabilities(tm).

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

#69

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
That's not a problem because Firefox has support for CORS, which is better than doing Flash because it's faster.

Of course, the server must cooperate with the browser by passing back allowance headers, but that's also true for Flash, as you need the server to have a crossdomain policy file for that.

Last year I wrote an article about it on my blog about how to configure it, check it out: http://bionicspirit.com/blog/2011/03/24/cross-domain-request...

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

#70
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I was thinking of postMessage, I haven't used CORS before but it looks like it ends up giving the same kind of outcome. In my case though I control the server have have the JS on 3rd parties so it is the reverse to what you are saying.

postMessage is more heavyweight than CORS.

Minus a couple of restrictions (i.e. with CORS you cannot rely on cookies being set, so you need to handle that from your Javascript somehow), CORS works well and it works on all major browsers, starting with IExplorer 8, which makes it awesome.

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