Mozilla is finally killing Flash next month (mostly)

Today, Mozilla announced its plans to do away with the thorn in our side that is Flash. Starting August 2016, with Firefox 48, Mozilla will block all Flash content deemed “not essential to the user experience.”

The move is the first in a series that will finally kill Flash for good. In 2017, Mozilla plans to up the ante by requiring click-to-activate approval for Flash, meaning a user will have to jump through another hoop to run Flash in the browser. It’s also planning to block Flash content that’s not visible to users, although a timeframe for this was unavailable.

The trend follows similar moves in previous versions of Firefox that saw Mozilla enabling less Flash content on all pages since September of 2015 as the Web continues the shift to HTML5 for better performance and fewer security vulnerabilities. Overall, them move should make for a safer, and more stable, Web experience, as evidenced in this chart that shows a significant decrease in crash rate as websites began to shift to HTML5 from Flash.

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Microsoft will follow suit this summer with Edge, presumably after the big Windows 10 Anniversary Update makes its way to users.