As a safety measure, plugins required by various sites will no longer activate by default

Sep 25, 2013 12:08 GMT  ·  By

Firefox plugins will no longer be activated by default once installed. This should reduce crashes, security problems and hang-ups in the browser.

The company’s Engineering Manager for Stability and Plugins, Benjamin Smedberg wrote that the change should help provide a much better Firefox experience for the browser’s users.

From now on, when a site tries to enable a plugin, users will be prompted whether to activate the third party app or not.

“Even though many users are not even ware of plugins, they are a significant source of hangs, crashes and security incidents. By allowing users to decide which sites need to use plugins, Firefox will help protect them and keep their browser running smoothly,” Smedberg wrote in a blog post.

The only plugin which will continue to run without being affected by the new changes with Firefox is Flash.

“Flash content is so common on the Web, and many websites use “hidden” Flash instances that the user does not see and cannot click on: making Flash click-to-play would be confusing for most users. Users with older versions of Flash that are known to be insecure will see the click-to-activate UI and will be prompted to upgrade to the latest version,” the blog post reads.

Firefox’s engineer admits that plugins used to be an important tool for prototyping and implementing new features. However, as browsers advanced, such development can occur directly within the browser.

“Mozilla encourages website developers to avoid using plugins wherever possible,” the company’s engineer wrote.

Google announced recently that it would be banning all but most widely used browser plugins starting January 2014, targeting NPAPI plugins, an old technology. The only ones that will be spared for another year are Silverlight, Unity, Google Earth, Java, Google Talk and Facebook Video.