In a recent blog post, Mozilla announced that it will stop supporting most of its plugins by the end of 2016. Mozilla reportedly has been using the NPAPI plugins to improve its Web platform and now when all its features like advanced graphics, video streaming and gaming features have become native Web APIs, the company has decided to dump all its NPAPI plugins for Firefox web browser. Adobe Flash, which is the most commonly used plugin will still continue to be a part of Firefox, says Mozilla.
As posted on the official blog, “Mozilla and Adobe will continue to collaborate to bring improvements to the Flash experience on Firefox, including on stability and performance, features and security architecture”.
Furthermore, Firefox will also keep supporting Oracle Java plugin for the websites that use Java to load. However, Oracle recommends switching to plugin-free solutions like Java Web Start.
Other modern web platforms like Microsoft and Google have already stopped supporting the NPAPI plugins in their web browsers like Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. Google started removing the plugins in the month of April this year and blocked them completely by September 2015.
However, Mozilla started the manual deactivation of plugins a few year back, where users were allowed to delete a plugin when required. While 64-bit Firefox for Windows has already blocked the NPAPI plugins, it will end completely by the end of next year.
Mozilla has taken this step to improve your web browsing experience and if you still have any queries, you may head over to the Mozilla Blog.
Why wait until the end of 2016? Give plug-in devs until the end of 2015 and then shut them down. Ultimately it comes down to users confidence in their browser that it’s safe and secure.
Guess this is a strike against AdBlockPlus, or other plugins that block advertisements.
You can’t outlaw adblockers, because though companies want to make money off ads, it is illegal to force people to view the increasingly big, blocky, x-rated, bandwidth leeching, & oft malicious ads. People have rights, too! Not just money hungry businesses!!!
I am not embarassed to say that in truth, if people are given no options to disable ads, firefox will be eliminated from mine, & thousands of other computers.
A browser with no adblocking capabilities is NOT safe, & it is NOT secure.
No amount of tightening down security will ever replace the security of blocking malicious ads in the 1st place.
In fact, ad blocking is 1 of the primary reasons to use Firefox. If they disable all plugins, bye bye firefox!!!
Have you ever wondered, when you use adblockers to block ads of a website and see only the content, you are leeching content for ‘free’! Bet you never looked at it that way.
They’re referring to the old insecure NPAPI plugins, not ones like Adblock Plus, etc… Incidentally, Adblock Plus is now available for all major browsers, including IE, just not Edge (which is a POS anyways)