The death of Adobe Flash is slowly but surely happening. Apple was the first to announce that they will stop supporting Flash in its Safari browser, followed by Google for Chrome, and now, it’s Mozilla’s turn.
Mozilla recently announced that they will be “reducing Adobe Flash usage in Firefox”. Starting in August, the company will block certain Flash content that is “not essential to the user experience” and by 2017, they will stop auto loading Flash on all website, using the same click-to-activate method as Apple and Google.
There’s no denying that Flash content can be unstable and tend to drain out your battery and slow things down. Mozilla notes that since websites have switched from Flash to other web technologies, particularly when YouTube and Facebook switched to HTML5 video, the plugin crash rate in Firefox has dropped significantly.
By blocking out Flash, Firefox will be able to give a better performance and improved battery life. For the start, Mozilla will curate a list of Flash content that can be replaced with HTML to minimise website compatibility problem. Mozilla also encourages websites that are currently using Flash or Silverlight for video or games to adopt HTML technologies as soon as possible.
