Mozilla is scheduled to release its latest Firefox 69 on 3rd September 2019. In the meantime, Firefox is taking some liberties and is ready to make some changes in the latest version of the browser. Mozilla’s plugin roadmap now shows that it has planned to disable Flash by default in Firefox. This initiative of shutting down Flash will be effective sometime this year.
A new bug filing has revealed that this plugin will be completely disabled for Firefox 69. First, it will affect the Nightly builds; that is, the action of disabling the Flash will take place first and work its way down to the Stable Channel. Adobe reportedly will be ending its support for its Flash plugin before 2020 comes to a close.
So Mozilla may be following in the footsteps of Adobe. Mozilla has said that they will be ending their Flash support completely for consumer versions of Firefox in early 2020. However, the Extended Support Release (ESR) version will still have the support until the rest of the year and till the end of the year. Starting from 2021, Mozilla will not load the plugin due to Adobe’s lack of security updates.
Flash falls under the category of NPAPI plugins, and for some time, these NPAPI plugins have proved to be a security as well as a performance problem for Firefox users. These plugins are not a necessity of any kind, and as asserted by Mozilla itself, these plugins have become obsolete. To do away with a primitive plugin, Mozilla wanted to evolve and move to a web that does not demand plugins and which primarily runs on web technologies such as HTML5.
To completely obliterate the Flash plugin, Mozilla has been phasing out Flash usage in its browser little by little since June 2016. In a step-by-step procedure, Mozilla first made Flash click-to-activate in Firefox 47, and finally, in Firefox 52, it withdrew support for non-Flash NPAPI plugins.
