Firefox Disables Adobe Flash Over Security Issues
Can’t play Candy Crush Saga on Firefox? In light of recent security flaws found in Adobe Flash, Mozilla has disabled Flash by default. For the past few days, Flash has been scrutinised for having security flaws, which was revealed when a leak of files of size 400GB happened during a hack on the Hacking Team, a spyware company.
In a tweet by Mark Schmidt, the head of the Firefox support team at Mozilla, the browser has disabled Flash version 18.0.0.203, meaning that Flash-based content will not work unless Adobe issues a patch to fix the security flaws. Users can of-course, enable it manually in the Settings menu.
http://twitter.com/MarkSchmidty/status/620783674561327104/photo/1
Adobe has now released a new version for Flash, 18.0.0.209, in which the security flaws have been fixed.
The dislike for Flash isn’t new. Just yesterday, Facebook’s new chief security officer asked Adobe to announce a “kill date” for Flash. In a tweet he said, “It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day. Even if it is 18 months from now, one set date is the only way to disentangle the dependencies and upgrade the whole ecosystem at once.”
Late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was also known to dislike Flash. In an open letter published in 2010, Jobs asked for the discontinuance of Flash, citing performance and security issues with the platform. He also named it the number one reason for a crash in various Mac systems.
A few months back, Google announced an updated version of its Chrome browser that would intelligently pause Flash. YouTube, which has supported it for a long time, dropped it in January in favour of HTML5.
It is only a matter of time before Adobe decides to drop Flash, considering that it already stopped the development of the mobile version back in 2011.
