Mozilla Firefox blocks Adobe Flash Player by default

Browser maker, Mozilla, has announced that it is blocking Adobe Flash Player in Firefox.

The announcement comes from Mark Schmidt, the head of Firefox Support.

This is what his tweet says:

BIG NEWS!! All versions of Flash are blocked by default in Firefox as of now. https://t.co/4SjVoqKPrR #tech #infosec pic.twitter.com/VRws3L0CBW

— Mark Schmidt (@MarkSchmidty) July 14, 2015

I have been noticing this myself. I use Firefox as my primary browser, and it has been displaying an annoying message “Firefox has prevented the unsafe plugin “Adobe Flash” from running on…..” which includes the website I was currently on.

Here is a screenshot of the message displayed in Firefox.

The Verge reports that Mozilla will enable Flash by default, when Adobe patches the vulnerabilities found in the plugin. Schmidt says that Firefox users can enable Flash from the settings menu of the browser.

The interesting bit here, is that Flash Player Plugin 18.0.0.203, which is being blocked by Firefox, is actually the latest version.

If you have read my previous write up, you will be aware that Adobe patched the Flash Player a month ago, to fix some critical vulnerabilities which affected Windows, Linux and Mac users. This happened after it was found that attackers used a loophole to feed a malicious SWF file (Adobe Flash Player format) to infect the end-user’s system.

More recently, a flaw in Adobe Flash Player was found to have been the cause of a breach in the servers of a security firm. Attackers exploited the vulnerability to make away with a whopping 400 GB of data.

Flash won’t be missed. Adobe  announced in 2011, that HTML5 is superior to Flash Player, and ended support for the same for its mobile version.

HTML5 is more secure and supports more features, which is why YouTube dropped support for Flash Player in January, and has switched to HTML5. The same can be said about Facebook’s videos as well. Speaking of the social network, yesterday, Facebook’s new CSO (Chief Security Officer) Alex Stamos, called for the death of Adobe Flash Player.

It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day.

— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2015

Mozilla has even went as far to add Flash Player to its blocklist here. You can see the screenshot of it featured in the first image of this article. Firefox’s about:addons page, is also displaying a warning that “Shockwave Flash is known to be vulnerable. Use with caution.”