14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla will disable Adobe Flash Player in Firefox 69, which is scheduled to launch in September this year.
Adobe will retire Flash Player in late 2020, and Mozilla’s decision to disable the plugin in its browser comes in anticipation of this moment, as the company wants to make sure its users are protected.
According to the company’s original roadmap, Mozilla initially planned to begin displaying a warning to users whenever Flash was loaded starting with the first months of 2019, but this idea was eventually dropped as the company believed it would have only created more confusion.
But as discovered recently by Sören Hentzschel (via GHacks), Mozilla will make a major step towards giving up on Flash Player entirely by disabling it by default in Firefox 69 due on September 3.
As it typically happens during the development of new Firefox updates, Flash will be disabled first in Nightly builds of the browser, before the change makes its way to beta builds and then to the production version.
Bye-bye, Flash!
The next step for Mozilla is then to remove support for Flash Player entirely, so starting with early 2020, consumer versions of Firefox would no longer work with Adobe’s plugin. The Extended Support Release (ESR) version of Firefox will be next later the same year before Adobe itself pulls the plug on the software.
Eventually, Mozilla will block Flash in Firefox in 2021, as the lack of security updates from its vendor means users would only be exposed to potential exploits.
Both Google and Microsoft announced plans to give up on Flash Player by the time Adobe abandons it too, so more browsers would disable the plugin by default in the coming updates.
The latest version of Mozilla’s browser is Firefox 64.0.2, and it was released only a few days ago with several bug fixes and performance improvements on desktop platforms.