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Firefox to Fully Drop Flash Support by the End of 2020

by Silviu STAHIE on May 18, 2020

Mozilla has decided to remove support altogether for Flash from its Firefox browser by December 2020, and updated the release schedule of the releases that will slowly integrate this important change.

The decision to drop Flash from browsers and operating systems was taken a long time ago, but many websites still rely on this antiquated technology. Flash was difficult to maintain, and new security problems were discovered regularly. It took companies and developers many years to reach this point.

According to a new schedule posted by Mozilla, the deprecation of Flash in Firefox started in June 2016 by disabling the plugin and requiring users to activate it manually. In 2019, Firefox 69 removed the “Always Activate” Flash option, so all users were required to set permissions when using a Flash-enabled website.

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As it stands, Adobe will completely stop shipping security updates for Flash at the end of 2020. In December 2020, Flash support will be completely removed from the consumer version of Firefox.

“Plugins are a security and performance problem for Firefox users,” says Mozilla. “NPAPI plugins are an obsolete technology, and Mozilla has been moving toward a Web which doesn’t need plugins. The last remaining NPAPI plugin, Adobe Flash, has announced an end-of-life plan.”

Users of Beta and Nightly versions of Firefox will see these changes much earlier, as the features are pushed upstream.

Starting in 2021, websites using Flash will have problems displaying that content to users, including Firefox.

The removal and replacement of Flash is actually a collaboration between Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, allowing all of them to be ready in time with their browsers and OS implementations.