Mozilla yesterday said it will follow other browser markers by curtailing use of Flash in Firefox next month.
The open-source developer added that in 2017 it will dramatically expand the anti-Flash restrictions: Firefox will require users to explicitly approve the use of Flash for any reason by any website.
As have its rivals, Mozilla cast the limitations (this year) and elimination (next year) as victories for Firefox users, citing improved security, longer battery life on laptops and faster web page rendering.
"Starting in August, Firefox will block certain Flash content that is not essential to the user experience, while continuing to support legacy Flash content," wrote Benjamin Smedberg, the manager of Firefox quality engineering, in a post to a company blog.
Firefox 48 is slated to ship on Aug. 2.
[...]
Firefox is late to the dump-Flash party.
Original Source: http://www.computerworld.com/article/3098606/web-browsers/firefox-sets-kill-flash-schedule.html
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 25 2016, @10:32AM
Java can die anytime. But, Java is less pervasive than flash was, at it's peak. In my experience, java was used for less "evil" than flash. For instance, I've never opened a web page, to find sixteen throbbing headers based on java.
IMHO, the history of flash is worse than that of java, by at least an order of magnitude. YMMV, depending on your own experiences.
I will note that I have found some useful applications based on java, aside from just games. I haven't looked at I2P lately, but it is entirely based on java. It also powered a pretty cool proxy chain, way back when. So, I know that java does have some redeeming values.
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Monday July 25 2016, @01:26PM
Java has also added some of its own security measures - current versions of the Java plugin refuse to play unsigned or self-signed .jars, with no override for the former and requiring you add their cert as a root certificate for the latter.
Which is actually kind of annoying if you're the kind of person to run old Java applets some professor('s TA) wrote to demonstrate ellipsoid equations or stuff like that. It's stuff that could probably be trivially done with modern tools but nobody seems to have been assed to rewrite them in Javascript.