Firefox 4 Going Flash-Free
Jun 25th, 2010 | By James Lewin | Category: General 
The Register reports that Firefox 4 is going flash free:
Mozilla vice president of products Jay Sullivan says that unlike Google, the open source outfit has no intention of bundling Firefox with Adobe Flash – or with a plug-in that runs native code inside the browser.
Mozilla believes that the future of online applications lies with web standards, including HTML5.
“Our idea of the web where you can use these technologies that are scriptable, that interact with the rest of the page, that can be mashed up and linked into and linked out of,” explains Sullivan. “These native apps are just little black boxes in a webpage. That’s not something we’re pursuing. We really believe in HTML, and this is where we want to focus.”
Currently, Firefox attempts to minimize crashes by running plug-ins in processes separate from the browser proper. But long-term, Mozilla plans to work around Flash.
“We’re trying to balance the reality of the web today,” explains Sullivan. “Flash is there. Our users are going to use it, and it’s going to crash. We want to protect them from that. But over time, we really believe that HTML5 is the future.”
Flash is dead. Good riddance.
This is very surprising! Does this mean that Flash won’t work at all in Firefox 4 or that you’ll just have to manually install the Flash plugin?
uhm, James, your headline implies to the casual reader that something has changed, But has it…? 😉
jd/adobe
@luke, thats why its has 95 market penetration and every major site uses it?
Megatron
Umm – Google?
Seriously, though, when you say that every major site uses it, that really translates into a lot of sites using it for banner ads and little else.
Very few major sites are using Flash to build their sites anymore, or the 100 million iOS users wouldn’t have a satisfactory browsing experience.
Google owns Youtube (all flash). Most of the good major sites do use flash (whether it be in the form of video or in the form of audio). It’s going to take a while if you are waiting on flash to die.
Correction: YouTube all flash??? Nope. Only the video player. And with HTML5, no need for Flash to play video. The whole YouTube site is based on html, javascript…
Finally, someone who did his homework. 🙂
“Correction: YouTube all flash??? Nope. Only the video player. ”
Are you joking? So YouTube still works fine, except for the videos? I’m very relieved. I just tried to play videos on Firefox 4, and I couldn’t.
We all know what this is about. More iFascism. “We’re a non profit, and so we only answer to you, the consumer. So please ignore the fact that we’ve got our nose up Steve Jobs’ ass on this.”
As a Linux user, the place where I’m used to installing flash on Firefox simply doesn’t exist in Firefox.4. And the FLV player.exe is useless to me. And so Firefox 4 is useless to me.
Looks like I’ll be going Firefox-Free!
I think this is great. I don’t really like Flash anyways.
You suck!!! Flash is powerful, I dont mean banners and popup ads, but with flash (flex) you can do amaizing application, shure html5 can do amazing things too, but users shout be able to decide:
dont like flash – dont install plugin
like flash – install plugin
BTW if you dont know technology and all it benefits dont say crap loud. Try to read a bit about it, know it for some time, then talk loud.
FF4 should support Flash. Or will they go Apple’s way dictating what people should use?
I’ve been a long happy user of FF, but they’re annoying me now.
Flash IS commonly used. Flash should work flawless in ANY webbrowser. Point.
Now in FF4 the handcursor isn’t even showing up. Are they doing this on purpose so people would think Flash websites suck and drop it? I know as many html websites that suck. It’s all about how it’s developed, not which platform you use.
Once and for all: let USERS decide whether they like flash or not. Don’t like it, delete it. Stop dictating!
Byebye Firefox… Flash isn’t! dead suckers.