Mozilla To Enable Click-To-Play For All Firefox Plugins By Default

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla on Tuesday announced a massive change to the way it loads third-party plugins in Firefox. The company plans to enable Click to Play for all versions of all plugins, except the latest release of Flash. This essentially means Firefox will soon only load third-party plugins when users click to interact with the plugin. Currently, Firefox automatically loads any plugin requested by a website, unless Mozilla has blocked it for security reasons (such as for old versions of Java, Silverlight, and Flash)."

Please include flash!

[Torp]

Subject says it all... why enable flash by default? Even if it didn't have any security holes, it's still the great battery eater...

Re:Need for speed!

[bogaboga]

I stopped using it because it was so much slower than Chrome at some basic tasks

Are you a "high speed" trader?

What real useful difference does it make? Seriously?

I predict chaos

[Phoenix Rising]

While we as technical users might enjoy a plugin-free experience with no extra clicking involved, the average Joe User is going to be pissed off.

I run with NoScript - does pretty much what Mozilla wants to do (plus script blocking), except without the big gray box. The average user is not interested in NoScript type functionality - they want a rich web experience out of the box, and if that includes Flash, PDF files, and audio, then that's what they want.

I suspect the reason Flash is turned on isn't because of ads - it's because there are a number of high profile corporate websites out there that become unusable if Flash isn't enabled.

Re:Please include flash!

[Secret Agent Man]

Which is why Chrome's Click to Play also puts a puzzle piece in your address bar, which you can click to run all plugins on a page once or all the time for a given domain. Does Firefox do something similar? There are lots of cases where there's no clickable space to enable a third party plugin.

Re:Please include flash!

[TheRaven64]

90% of auto-starting flash is adverts. For the few things that are actually useful content, it isn't much extra effort to click. I was amazed at how much my browsing experience improved when I installed a click-to-play plugin for Flash.

Re:Please include flash!

[Cajun Hell]

Most web music players, for instance. Blocking flash by default would break quite a few sites.

Some peoples' "broken" sites are other peoples' "fixed" sites.

Re:Please include flash!

[Lucky75]

I don't understand how people keep getting their extensions broken by firefox updates? If they're written properly, they don't break with updates anymore.

Re:Poor misfigured HTML, hateful and hated all aro

[Corporate T00l]

I can make pixel perfect feature rich cross-platform native application for Linux, Win, BSD, OSX, Android, iOS in 1/3rd the time it takes me to ensure the same "web app" works in all the browsers and OSs.

I want whatever development tool chain you're using. Just dealing with the different installer mechanisms on those platforms makes my head spin. What's your secret?

Re:I predict chaos

[Dragonslicer]

While we as technical users might enjoy a plugin-free experience with no extra clicking involved, the average Joe User is going to be pissed off.

I know this can be a dangerous idea, but I think you may be underestimating the average user. I suspect the conversation will go something like this:

Average User: Hey, why doesn't the video play automatically anymore?
Other Person: You have to click the big Play button first.
Average User: Oh, okay.

The average user probably won't ever understand why they have to do it, nor will they care, but they'll be able to repeat the necessary step(s).