Firefox 85 Hammers the Final Nail Into the Adobe Flash Coffin (cnet.com) 67
With Mozilla's release of Firefox 85 on Tuesday, Adobe's once ubiquitous Flash technology is really gone for good. The software had been widely used to expand gaming, video and animation on the web, though Adobe stopped supporting it at the end of 2020. Firefox was the last major browser to support Flash. From a report: Apple, whose late boss Steve Jobs helped sink Flash by banning it from iPhones and iPads, ditched Flash with Safari 14 in September 2020. Google Chrome, the most widely used browser, completely excised it on Jan. 19 with version 88. Microsoft's Edge 88 followed suit on Jan. 21. The schedule of removals shows just how hard it is to advance technology foundations as widely used as the web. Browser makers for years wanted to remove Flash, replacing it with more advanced standards built directly into the web. Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" letter in 2010 solidified the opposition, and Adobe started recognizing the software's doom by scrapping the Android version of Flash in 2011. It's taken years of effort to drop Flash completely. Adobe took until 2017 to announce that Flash would be completely unsupported at the end of 2020, and still some are willing to jump through lots of hoops to keep Flash around a little longer.
This seems wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Software companies really need to stop listening to the dumbest of the internet users.
Just another reason not to switch back to it.
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Have fun on IE11.
Re:This seems wrong (Score:5, Informative)
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Now if only I found an installer of that version that didn't try to load its data off of adobe.com....
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That license typically can be revoked
That's why we have bootlegging. Don't need no steenking license
With all the flash players gone. Making flash movies with my old software for my friends will like encrypting them
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Re:This seems wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, one big time bomb with Flash is that it's basically dead. It was a security nightmare even at its height, and will continue to be so. And really, we've known this day was coming for a decade. If there are still organizations using Flash in 2020 then they have chosen the path to oblivion. We pay for a lot of courses for our clients/customers, and we've started telling schools who purchase courses through that if they haven't moved on from Flash (and some have not), then they're off our vendor list.
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History is littered with companies who bought into a technology that ultimately went the way of the dodo. Heck, I worked for an alarm company that used monitoring software and line cards running on a DOS machine built in the early 1990s. The owner probably could have afforded the upgrade, but it was a lot of fun having to source line cards on eBay and paying whatever the seller wanted, just to keep it going. I even was testing running it in DOSEMU with USB serial ports to try to keep the old software runnin
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Thankfully open source implementations exist to free you from being Adobe's bitch (or yet-another-proprietary format.)
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And just how long do you think those projects are going to be alive? This is like bitching because MS doesn't support VB6 anymore. Well go ahead, use it, but it's only going to get worse.
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That license typically can be revoked, ...
For our American readers, he means "killed" -- as per this [wikipedia.org]:
Originally titled Licence Revoked in line with the plot, the name was changed during post-production [to "Licence to Kill"] due to American test audiences associating the term with driving.
Re:This seems wrong (Score:5, Informative)
I thought Firefox was all about user choice. If I want to run Flash, I should be allowed to. Adobe or the browser makers should have no say in that.
Software companies really need to stop listening to the dumbest of the internet users.
Just another reason not to switch back to it.
For years Firefox has wanted to remove the NPAPI interface in favour of the PPAPI interface.
For many years Flash was the last NPAPI plug-in on Firefox, and the only reason to keep the NPAPI plumbing.
What Firefox did was finally remove the NPAPI plumbing. This is not directed at Flash per se. And the removal of NPAPI makes the life of the developers easier, and the user's browsers more secure.
Nonetheless, if a user wants to still run flash in Firefox, they have a choice:
Head to the ESR 78 version. It will receive security patches until about Sept 2021, and still has the NPAPI plumbing intact, so that it can run Flash.
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> For many years Flash was the last NPAPI plug-in on Firefox, and the only reason to keep the NPAPI plumbing.
That is simply not true.
NPAPI support is the one reason I keep pale moon around, to run various plugins that cannot possible be created in ppapi (pale moon is a much saner idea that running an old version of ff, nad hey ff is my main browser (though having no reason to run flash I have no idea if it works in pm!)).
ppapi makes it so plugins cannot do many useful things. Yes this is more secure but
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Different API (Score:2)
They could've just disabled support by default.
That's what used to be in the past between when Adobe did EOL Flash and Firefox 85.
But the problem is that Flash relies on its own different and old plugin API infrastructure (NPAPI) that is not shared by other plugins nowadays.
At some point of time, Mozilla is going to stop maintaining a completely different plugin infrastructure that is use by no current plugin, and is only exclusively used by a plugin which isn't maintained any more (That would require too much maintenance to keep the thing secure and ke
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100% correct, but there is fourth chioce, is very similar to option 3, but instead of making an Open source flash browser with the NPAPI Flash plugin, you make a Flash browser with the PPAPI Flash plug-in.
Opensource plugin (Score:2)
Back there, there was Gnash and Lightspark (plug-ins) and Shumway (javascript).
Nowadays, there is Ruffle.
But one hits the same problem as Wine:
Flash is (was) closed source, and all opensource alternatives need to progress by reverse engineering, so they aren't 100% perfect compatible.
The best would be that now that Adobe has discontinueted flash, that they open as much source code as they can and/or donate source as reference to Ruffle and other projects.
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Flash plugin, you make a Flash browser with the PPAPI Flash plug-in.
That would be useless. Chrome/Chromium is dropping support for PPAPI plugins, and Firefox never supported PPAPI plugins. The capability to make any browser content/rendering plugins at all is going away.
API (Score:2)
The capability to make any browser content/rendering plugins at all is going away.
There are these little things called HTML5, Javascript and WebAsm. You might want to look into them.
The only thing which has changed is that you do not hook directly into the browser binary using CPU-specific binaries anymore (but run it on the inner platform). Which is better from the point of view of security for the former and cross-platform compatibility for ther latter.
Thoguh saddly HTML5/EME is part of the standards, and that one has provition to be used as an ugly hook similar to flash (though not us
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you could always for the repository and add the parts you want yourself. It is open source.
I bet it doesn't support html 1.0 any more either. Deprecating old tech has to happen sometimes. Although it is best if you leave a path to upgrade.
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Still renders properly
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Rosetta Stone needs to get on the ball (Score:1)
Rosetta Stone still requires Flash for full functionality.
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Yet another Firefox story (Score:4, Insightful)
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When FF57 dropped, it removed 2 add ons that I liked using with no way to replace them.
Windows 10 makes me fix my computer every six months when it releases a service pack.
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I'm not here to prove anything: you win some, you lose some.
Often times changes may make things more difficult for long-time users, as they have to relearn something they might find less intuitive. But you have to remember that Firefox has yet to succeed in drawing the attention of newer users, and this could simply be an attempt to appeal to the more mainstream audience. (Perhaps I should clarify, in this context, I'm talking about the soon to be implemented UI refresh). Say what you will, but if more mark
Is not gone for good from FireFox (Score:2)
FireFox ESR 78 will receive security patches until about Sept 2021, is fully supported by Mozila, has the NPAPI plumbing intect, and can run Flash.
So, to declare Flash "Gone for good" from FireFox, one has to wait until ESR78 is out of support...
Written from LatAm, on a Mac, with FF ESR 78 with Chinese flash client ;-)
Slashdot browser when? (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, why don't all the super smart posters here make their own web browser? Surely they know everything and would make the bestest most flawless browser that would make everyone happy! So why haven't they??
Re:Slashdot browser when (Score:4, Informative)
Alternative browsers get subject to more captchas and “we don’t support this browser” messages. I tried using Waterfox for about two years before I gave up and gone back to an inferior but compatible browser. In fact I mostly just browse on my iPad most of the time since the web is becoming too mobile focused these days.
The governments of the world are too dependent on Google to antitrust them enough to let a good browser into the market place. China did it due to their totalitarian government but they just replaced Google with Tencent and Baidu.
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They are called standards for a reason. If you follow them then it shouldn't matter what browser you are using.
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Firefox was the Slashdot browser until Google started forcing them to do things like deliberately break their extension apis because xul was too good at getting rid of Google spyware.
They got rid of XUL because it was causing the memory leaks that people bitched about. See? Mozilla (and others) damned if they do, damned if they don't
Alternative browsers get subject to more captchas and “we don’t support this browser” messages. I tried using Waterfox for about two years before I gave up and gone back to an inferior but compatible browser. In fact I mostly just browse on my iPad most of the time since the web is becoming too mobile focused these days.
Websites really should do feature detection, not browser sniffing. If Waterfox doesn't support a standard, then it's a flaw in the browser. If the website is doing User Agent sniffing to display the support message, then it's a flaw in the website, and a simple user agent spoofer would fix that.
The governments of the world are too dependent on Google to antitrust them enough to let a good browser into the market place. China did it due to their totalitarian government but they just replaced Google with Tencent and Baidu.
IE's dominance through lack of a successful antitrust suit didn
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Copyright prohibits Mozilla from fixing Flash (Score:3)
Under current law, nobody but Adobe is legally allowed to fix the Flash Player codebase, and Adobe finds doing so unprofitable. It is allowed to create an original codebase performing the same function, and I encourage you to try your hand at it.
XUL: other reasons. (Score:2)
Firefox was the Slashdot browser until Google started forcing them to do things like deliberately break their extension apis because xul was too good at getting rid of Google spyware.
The main trouble with XUL is that it required Firefox to run in a single proc. (With all subsequent troubles, such as a crash taking down the whole browser).
Getting rid of Google spyware is orthogonal to XUL vs. WebExtension: Mozilla did add extensions to WebExtensions API and you can get things like NoScript to run in modern versions too.
Alternative browsers get subject to more captchas and “we don’t support this browser” messages.
I dunno, web works fine for me.
I might be still getting a bit more of those when using Tor and website which haven't turned tor-specific support in CloudFlare.
Is your comp
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Well, why don't all the super smart posters here make their own web browser? Surely they know everything and would make the bestest most flawless browser that would make everyone happy! So why haven't they??
Well they did... but it turned out that nobody else liked Lynx as much as they did. ;)
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i like Lynx ( problem now days is all the UI developers want to control the 'expierence' rather then present useful information.)
-- If you don't get the irony of this Joke it is likely you don't remember the original html 1.0 standard from 1992.
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They're turfing NPAPI because it's an old plugin system with a helluva lot of security problems. It's also a plugin API that has only one significant plugin still running in it, and that's Flash. Why should Firefox developers continue to support a very ancient plugin system in mainline code? For goodness sake, NPAPI is now 25 years old, and browser makers have been dumping support for it for a few years now. In fact, part of making a browser more secure is dumping old protocols and APIs. Are you freaking ou
Is there a portable browser with embedded flash? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are a disturbing number of IT products dependent on Flash or Java. Many of them exorcised these, but sometimes you run across some legacy product that needs it in order to be managed.
While I'm 100% in favor of it being gone, sometimes this "burn it with fire" campaigns wind up making some critical tasks impossible because you can no longer make it work unless you have some kind of time capsule computer.
Is there some portable version of Firefox with Flash embedded? I wouldn't expect Chrome to do this.
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While I'm 100% in favor of Flash being gone, sometimes this "burn it with fire" campaigns wind up making some critical tasks impossible because you can no longer make it work unless you have some kind of time capsule computer.
Is there some portable version of Firefox with Flash embedded? I wouldn't expect Chrome to do this.
ESR 72 until About Sept 2021 + Flash 32.0.0.371 is about as good as you will get "gratis" and with no hoops (config changes, patching of the plugin with a hex editor or other weird non-enterprise-y stuff).
If you are located inside China (and only inside china), you can download NPAPI or PPAPI Flash 33, and it will be security patched for a while longer. Again, Use FireFox ESR 78, for if you go the PPAPI route, you'll have to jump through hoops to convince Chrom(e/ium/edgium) to use it (MMS.cfg, registry cha
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I'm just a lonely consultant who gets stuck supporting the cheapest ass clients in the world who stay with the worst and most obsolete technologies until they about fall off a cliff.
I've been burned by expired or revoked certificates in web interfaces, Java, and Flash in the past. At some point it's truly not my problem, but it often becomes my problem when I'm committed to something only to find out I need to deal with some out of scope component to meet my obligations and it turns out it relies on some o
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The system we use for our biggest government contract is built on top of Siebel, and requires the Java plugin for facilitating the upload of wet signature documents. I told our government reps a decade ago that support for the Java plugin was going to end for pretty much all major browsers. Their solution, thus far, has been typical. For a while they used the Firefox ESR, but then, when Firefox announced Java plugin support was dying, well, the obvious solution came to them; move back to IE11.
My last meetin
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So isn't it possible to get or pay someone to make a plug in that supports the feature anyway?
Free and Open Specs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Adobe shot themselves in the foot, for not playing the long game with Flash. HTML will always win the long term, not because it is better or faster. But because it is an Open Specification. If I wanted to create my own HTML Rendering engine, I could I just need to to W3C get the specs, and code to the specs, and bang, my home made browser can operate most of the Web. It may or may not be as good as the competition, but it would be functional, if I code it off of the specs.
Flash has fallen to the likes of these other dead "Web Technologies" such Java Applets, ActiveX, and Sliverlight. Which were licensed in a way that one couldn't just make a product to emulate its functionality, you would either need to do things like in OpenJDK or OpenSWT where you coded something that more or less is 99.9% compatible, but based of reversed engineering. Where the original license holder could overnight make all your work invalid by introducing some sort of incompatibility.
Having an Open Specification with an Open License, probably would had helped keep the technology alive and going still, allowing Apple to say make a version that works with mobile devices better, allowing Adobe to License with other players who may want to use their own software. As well doing what Adobe does best is their productivity suites.
Flash had a good run, Because it offered features that wasn't in HTML for nearly 20 years. But when HTML finally allowed Vector Graphics, That put the end of Flashes advantages, other than having something where people cannot easily read and alter.
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Re:Free and Open Specs? (Score:4, Interesting)
But when HTML finally allowed Vector Graphics, That put the end of Flashes advantages, other than having something where people cannot easily read and alter.
Yes ... and no.
The barrier to entry to create the rich interfaces that Flash made possible is still far higher than it was for Flash producers.
Sure, there's a plethora of applications that will assist you with creating experiences which match what Flash had to offer, but they still haven't matured to the point where near anyone could churn out the interactivity that Flash offered.
Flash was an absolute mainstay for me early in my web dev career, as it was for millions of others.
It enabled me to create what I couldn't with HTML - but sure, it was the wild west of web dev back then.
The reality is, the *change* in how the web is created and consumed is what nailed that coffin lid shut.
Video, via faster connections, replaced at least the WOW factor that flash offered.
Video on the web, as we know it now, was near impossible back when Flash was king - we had the codecs, we just didn't have the bandwidth.
The advance of HTML and indeed JavaScript put in a few more nails.
The maturity of the web and a concern for accessibility, put in a lot of nails - and accessibility also means open api's.
But it is still true that to create now, what Flash could do 20 years ago, has a far larger learning curve - a lot of that has to do with the plethora of devices that can consume web content.
Back in the late 90's right through to the mid-noughties, we were still stuck in 'Desktop land'. There was WAP, but nobody took it seriously.
We didn't have to worry about 'responsive' experiences.
Accessibility, for the most part, was an afterthought.
We are absolutely in a better place now, but we are a bit poorer for the sheer beauty of how easy it was to create interactive content.
It can be done now - it can be done infinitely better - but that barrier to entry has become incredibly steep for content producers.
I guess it mirrors a lot of web tech.
Gone are the days of smashing out a few HTML pages with a rich SWF interactive experience embedded within, and uploading it via FTP to a server - super easy to learn and do.
And yeah, I'm *glad* they are gone, but hell, I miss Flash. I loved the simplicity of it.
I made pointless interactive CDROM's with it, back in the day when it was cool to give a customer a CDROM, that they would've thrown in the bin minutes later...
hmmm. I'll get my coat.
Goodbye Flash, you were fun, but outstayed your welcome...
The Web matured - at least in terms of development... ... but now we have to contend with billions of pointless videos.
Forgot to mention... DATA (Score:2)
Data was another aspect that nailed further on that coffin.
We have a web now that is so incredibly data driven, that no amount of scripting on a proprietary platform could hope to match.
So much is tied to API's - to microservices - that now drive a rich, data driven web.
I guess, my overall point is that it wasn't just security and being proprietary that killed off Flash - the web moved on and Flash didn't.
Re:Free and Open Specs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, Flash is probably one of the best examples of a failure mode of open source. Flash was originally created as an animation tool. You create a background and spites, and Flash lets you animate them along arbitrary paths. That's all the developers (FutureWave and Macromedia, not Adobe) ever intended it to be. If you look at the list of TV shows [wikipedia.org] and movies [wikipedia.org], it's an impressive resume. You'll recognize most of those shows from your childhood.
In the late 1990s, web developers were pushing the limits of HTML, which at the time only supported static pages of text and pictures. They wanted to add audio, video, and scriptable elements (like drop-down menus). As you suggest, they begged the W3C to add these features to the HTML standard.. The people heading the W3C at the time had sticks up their asses, and refused. They believed HTML should remain pure to its original intent - a method of transmitting text and pictures. No audio, no movies, no scripting. If you look at the HTML timeline [wikipedia.org], you'll notice a nearly 15 year gap between HTML 4.01 (1999) and HTML 5 (2014). That was the W3C sitting on their asses and refusing to add scripting and multimedia to HTML.
Since the W3C refused to modify HTML, web developers started looking for other ways to add scripting and multimedia to websites. And hey, look at this, there's this animation format called Flash which was low-bandwidth and let them do just that. You could transmit the background, sprites, and paths even over a dialup connections, and have them animate on the user's browser. So they began incorporating Flash into their website designs. That's how Flash became the web standard. The people in charge of the open source HTML standard refused to listen to what the users wanted, so the users figured out a way to work around their obstinance.
Flash was never intended for use over networks, much less expected to become the de facto web standard. That's why it's so full of security holes. The original developers only intended it to be run locally. It only became the web standard because the open source process failed. A few people in power over the HTML standard refused to listen to overwhelming users requests, and held back progress in the web standard for over a decade. They created the situation which saddled us with Flash as a web standard.
This is what Open Source lacks - a good method for users to signal to developers what new features they want, and incentivize developers to implement those new features. In the for-profit model, this feedback and incentive comes in the form of payment. Users send money to developers for implementing the features they want. If one developer refuses, another will gladly implement those features and take the users' money (and market share). But in open source it's possible for people controlling a dominant project to hold back progress for a decade for no reason other than misguided principles.
Open source works within the developer community, where the users are also developers and can add the missing features that they want. But once an open source project expands beyond that and builds up a much larger layperson userbase who doesn't have the technical skills to write code, it basically degenerates into serfdom. You have the nobles (developers) who control the project and decide everything, and the serfs (users) who have to go along with
Firefox dropping addons shut their own coffin (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, dropping addons was a fucked-up decision.
You can run old, portable versions. (Score:4, Informative)
https://portableapps.com/node/... [portableapps.com]
If you're still running Flash you don't care about security or need updates unless it's a very niche case and VMs etc can handle that if you don't want it on your main install.
Banned Flash (Score:2)
I banned Flash in 1995. Took a long time for the rest of the world to catch up ...
bizzare human behavior. (Score:1)