Reducing Adobe Flash Usage in Firefox

I was hoping that Shumway, Mozilla&#x27;s effort to render swf files using JS (like what PDF.js is to Adobe Reader), would be released at some point. It looks like the project has been added to the Firefox Graveyard [1]. I don&#x27;t have Adobe Reader installed on my Mac any more, and don&#x27;t really miss it.<p>While Chrome&#x27;s proposal to white-list the top-10 domains is a good start at curbing the loading of Flash on my laptop, I prefer the approach being considered by Safari to report that Flash (and other legacy plugins) is not available on the platform even if it is installed. [2]<p>Safari&#x27;s approach will ensure that most users see HTML5 content and won&#x27;t really miss Flash. Folks who use sites like Twitch that insist on Flash will know how to force Safari to load the content they want to view.<p>Unfortunately, Safari&#x27;s user share outside of Mobile is very low. We need Chrome, Firefox and IE to adopt a similar approach (or agree on an approach for all vendors) if we are to really rid ourselves of Flash.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;describecomponents.cgi?product=Firefox%20Graveyard" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;describecomponents.cgi?product=...</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webkit.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;6589&#x2F;next-steps-for-legacy-plug-ins&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webkit.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;6589&#x2F;next-steps-for-legacy-plug-ins&#x2F;</a><p>Edit: Moved links to the end of the post.

I&#x27;m very torn on this subject. I&#x27;m always wary when browser vendors force the hand of users, programmers, and everyone else.<p>I fully understand that Flash has had an outsized share of vulnerabilities &#x27;affecting browsing&#x27; over the years; I fully understand that Adobe has deprecated Flash for new content production; I fully appreciate that the &#x27;web platform&#x27; has acquired new APIs and capabilities over the last four years, making it a more potent platform than the days when people opted for Flash or Silverlight because an external runtime was the only way to reliably deliver the experiences those developers wanted.<p>But in a world where a HTML webpage from 1991 [1] still loads and renders fine, I&#x27;m worried about the sheer amount of content that exists in Flash from the 2000s that will be made inaccessible. Sure, those developers should have known that developing on a proprietary platform is a risky bet, but this was back when Javascript was awful, browsers were racing to implement not-yet-final enhancements to CSS3 with vendor prefixes, and powerful vendors were bickering about which formats to support in a proposed &lt;video&gt; tag. These developers of course should&#x27;ve known better, but they had no other choice.<p><i>What Mozilla is doing here is actually quite reasonable</i>, but they&#x27;re under pressure from Google Chrome who can unilaterally decide to ban flash from all but the top 10 sites, and get away with it due to their control of multiple platforms and their unwillingless to compromise.<p>If Mozilla&#x27;s tactics stray too far from Google&#x27;s, they risk being seen as followers, rather than policy drivers; furthemore they answer to a divided fanbase that on one hand wants an open, independent web (in which Flash has no place), and on the other hand, wants a refuge from the incumbent browser maker&#x27;s unilateral policies (currently Google, previously Microsoft).<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;info.cern.ch&#x2F;hypertext&#x2F;WWW&#x2F;TheProject.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;info.cern.ch&#x2F;hypertext&#x2F;WWW&#x2F;TheProject.html</a>

I don&#x27;t have Flash installed at all anymore and it works quite well. For the few sites that don&#x27;t work without Flash these days, I either don&#x27;t care or use youtube-dl -g [0] or livestreamer [1] and open the direct video link in Browser or VLC.<p>Twitch is one of the popular sites that don&#x27;t have a working HTML5 player for the masses (it does work without Flash using the methods above). There&#x27;s Beam.pro which has some interesting approaches to live streaming with HTML5 [2]. The only thing I haven&#x27;t found a great solution for are the big Music streaming sites, which all rely on Flash (the others shut down). Some people told me Google Play Music may or may not work with HTML5 but I haven&#x27;t tried that yet.<p>Also, a great number of websites will ask you to turn on Flash when installed but deactivated and only use the HTML5 player when it&#x27;s not actually installed. I guess it&#x27;s a design flaw that Browsers report disabled or click-to-play plugins to websites.<p>0: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rg3.github.io&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rg3.github.io&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;</a><p>1: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.livestreamer.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.livestreamer.io&#x2F;</a><p>2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.beam.pro&#x2F;topic&#x2F;168&#x2F;where-we-re-at-with-html5-video" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.beam.pro&#x2F;topic&#x2F;168&#x2F;where-we-re-at-with-html5-...</a>

If you Google &#x27;top facebook games&#x27;, and you browse to each one, you will find a majority of them use Flash. Here are a few of them:<p>- Candy Crush (50,000,000+ monthly users)<p>- Dragon City (10,000,000+ monthly users)<p>- Criminal Case (10,000,000+ monthly users)<p>- Angry Bird Friends (1,000,000+ monthly users)<p>I&#x27;m currently working on a Flash game with a large player base. Firefox&#x27;s suggestion of adopting HTML technologies is not simple when the game is 9 years old! I think many Facebook games are going to run into a similar issue.<p>It&#x27;s getting scary now tho, it seems like Firefox and Chrome are aggressively trying to get rid of the usage of Flash. We&#x27;ve essentially decided that we&#x27;re going to convert this 9 year old game to C++ (via Emscripten) in the next year. Good luck to everyone else who is going through the same thing as we are.

&gt; We categorized SWFs as fingerprinting SWFs if they were smaller than 5x5 pixels<p>Coming soon: 6x6 fingerprinting&#x2F;tracking SWFs?

It is interesting to contrast this discussion today with the discussion Jobs&#x27; &quot;Thoughts on Flash&quot; spurred 6 years ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1304310" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1304310</a>

&gt; Over the past few years, Firefox has implemented Web APIs to replace functionality that was formerly provided only by plugins. This includes ... fast 2D and 3D graphics<p>Just a friendly reminder that the 2D graphics functionality of Flash is still not replaced for a massive chunk of graphics and games built with a vector-based visual style.<p>Canvas 2D vector graphics still do not properly antialias adjacent edges (shows garish seams and unexpected transparencies), whereas Flash would render them properly and with high quality.

Any plan to reduce&#x2F;remove flash needs to address the HUGE amount of small flash based web games. Just look for online playable games for kids and you&#x27;ll see how many there.<p>&quot;Websites that currently use Flash or Silverlight for video or games should plan on adopting HTML technologies as soon as possible.&quot;<p>This is utterly unrealistic, these games are 10 or more years old sometimes, and still played in large numbers, with no money available for the developer to rewrite them.<p>Only an automatic transpiler of some kind has any chance here.

Now that HTML5 is gradually replacing Flash, has anyone seen a good Flashblock replacement for blocking HTML5?

The only use for Flash I have these days is for streaming sites like Twitch. Once that&#x27;s tackled, I&#x27;ll be more than happy to remove the plugin.<p>That said, it used to be easy to block annoying stuff by having Flash enabled on demand.

I know this is unimportant, but I have to say, I strongly dislike this green trendline that they have fitted to the graph.<p>It clearly does not fit. The graph flattened out at Jul 2015.

I really wonder if one day (perhaps in a distant future) HTML will end up on a graveyard, just like Flash, and what we can do now to make this event less painful.

Mozilla needs to do outreach to the porno industry to get them to convert.

Good. They&#x27;re going slow, starting with fingerprinting and supercookies, which is nice for users. I welcome the end of Flash.<p>I personally killed flash from Chrome about a year ago. I&#x27;ve seen a few sites that use it, which I just leave, but I haven&#x27;t seen anything I can&#x27;t live without.

&gt;The criteria for adding content to the blocklist are:<p>&gt;* Blocking the content will not be noticeable to the Firefox user.<p>&gt;* It is possible to reimplement the basic functionality of the content in HTML without Flash.<p>There are three classes of content in the block list: Fingerprinting, Supercookie and Viewability. While I&#x27;m heard of various fingerprinting techniques besides Flash, I&#x27;m curious how &quot;to reimplement without Flash the basic functionality&quot; of supercookies, given its main feature is persistence despite of user&#x27;s effort.

I had it disabled in Chrome for the last 6 months or so, and very rarely needed to temporarily re-enable it, like maybe twice in all that time. And even that is not a big deal, you just go to chrome:&#x2F;&#x2F;plugins and switch it on and back off later, it takes 2-3 clicks to do it.

That&#x27;s funny. I guess there&#x27;s a reason why I&#x27;m being forced into using old browsers rather than supporting any of the rabid anti-Flash nonsense. Then again, I&#x27;m anti HTML5 &amp; WebDRM (now under the more innocuous title of EME)

I don&#x27;t install flash these days. I usually browse in Firefox and don&#x27;t really miss it. On the occasions when I do need flash for something, I&#x27;ll fire up Chrome because it has flash built in.

I think Chrome&#x27;s propsal to whitelist the top ten domains and block all the other sites by default would be more effective at curving the web&#x27;s dependency on flash.<p>Edit: Turns out Firefox is planning on blocking all sites by default. So Firefox&#x27;s approach looks more promising.

It&#x27;s crazy that the perpetual security disaster hasn&#x27;t been enough to disable Flash so far. (Goes for Chrome too, but at least they have reasonable sandboxing for it)