CODEWITHSUNDEEP
firefoxpluginsflash
hedgehog90
hedgehog90

Reputation: 1511

Firefox 35 - Flash no longer a default plugin?

I just installed Firefox on a new computer running Windows 8.1. I usually use Chrome but recently I've been redesigning my website and today I tried loading it on multiple browsers to see if there were any problems.

It's a Flash games site with lots of flash ads. So when I went to my site in the new Firefox browser, I was surprised to see a lot of "plugin needed" boxes. I tried loads of sites, and it became apparent that flash was not installed in the firefox browser at all. No Flash was loading.

Bizarrely, the grey box telling me I needed a plugin didn't give me any hint as to what plugin I needed, provided no link, and even blocked the fail-safe link to adobe that is displayed if flashplayer is not installed when using swfobject.js. I tried searching for the flash player update in the firefox add-ons - nothing. I tried searching on google and downloaded the general flash player update (http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/) - installed it and nothing changed.

Eventually after 20 minutes of searching, I found this obscure page on Adobe: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html I downloaded and ran the exe for 'Plugin-based browsers' and this worked.

It appears the latest version of Firefox has deliberately not included Flash Player, which is utterly mad if that's really true. However, I can't find any discussion or documentation that this is the case. But then why wasn't it included in my version?

Does anybody know anything about this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2805

Answers (1)

Fiasco Labs
Fiasco Labs

Reputation: 6457

Firefox has never included Flash, you always need to go to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer and download the Flash Plugin on your first install of Firefox. Make sure that you turn on autoupdate for Flash by using the Flash cpanel app in your Windows Control Panel. Then check regularly to make sure Flash is still autoupdating. It can have a bad habit of failing.

It's only recently that Microsoft includes Flash and only on IE on Windows 8+ as a copy of Google's attempt to increase Flash security by including it in Chrome some time back. IE gets its Flash updates through Windows Update when Microsoft gets the patches applied.

Google is the 800lb gorilla that gets what it wants and twisted Adobe's arm to force them to supply Flash code so they can do their own updates via their Pepper Flash module which updates when Chrome autoupdates.

While Mozilla will warn you that Flash is out of date, they do not have the monetary clout like huge corporations (Microsoft, Google) to force Adobe to give them source code so they can fix Adobe's security sieve as it happens.

Mozilla has chosen to promote HTML5 and open DRM to hurry the eventual demise of a piece of Macromedia Legacy web extensions that has been plaguing us with serious zero day exploits (Jan-Feb 2015 most recent) that often appear back-to-back and often get 2 try patch releases in the hope that it gets fixed.

And in that same timeframe, often Chrome and Windows 8 versions of IE have a similar lag to bug fix, though a lot quicker than Adobe.

Get in the habit manually checking Chrome's version, Chrome can suffer update failure despite its automatic update feature.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions