Mozilla plans to drop Flash support in Firefox 84 (December 2020)

[harlan4096]

All major browser makers plan to remove Flash support from their browsers in 2020. Adobe announced the deprecation of Adobe Flash in 2017 and companies like Google, Microsoft or Mozilla revealed plans to end support for the technology in their browsers. Adobe Flash won't receive security updates anymore from 2021 on.

Firefox uses a plugin system to integrate Adobe Flash, that is installed on the system, into the web browser. Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers ship with a native Flash integration instead.

The current state of Flash in Firefox is the following: Flash is disabled by default in Firefox but users may activate Flash on individual sites if they require it. Flash is the only NPAPI plugin that Firefox still supports; support for other NPAPI-based plugins such as Microsoft Silverlight was dropped in Firefox 52 which Mozilla released in 2017.

Mozilla updated the Flash deprecation schedule recently; the organization revealed the Firefox version and the month in which Flash would be removed from Firefox. According to the schedule, Flash will be removed in Firefox 84 Stable, which Mozilla plans to release in December 2020. Flash support will be removed earlier from development builds. From Firefox Nightly, the cutting edge development build of Firefox, it will be removed in October 2020.

Firefox users may disable Flash in the browser already or remove Flash from the system entirely as this will also remove Flash support in Firefox.

Here is the remaining schedule:

• September 2019 (current state) -- Always Activate option is removed. Firefox will always prompt for permission if sites require Flash.
  
• October 2020 -- Flash support is removed in Firefox Nightly 84.
  
• December 2020 -- Flash support is removed from Firefox Stable 84. No version of Firefox will support Flash anymore from that point in time.
  

Mozilla plans to remove Flash support in Firefox 84 but there is a chance that these plans may change. It seems unlikely, considering that Adobe won't distribute security updates anymore for Flash in 2021.

Google plans to remove Flash support from Chromium in January 2021 with the release of Chrome 88. The change will affect other Chromium-based web browsers as well.

Closing WordsMost of the Web has moved on already but there are still sites out there that use Flash. Some may cease to work once Flash is no longer support or updated, others may be updated eventually to newer technologies.

Now You: Any site that you visit regularly that still uses Flash?
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