Starting from Firefox 69, Mozilla will disable Adobe Flash by default, a process that aims to completely remove the support for the popular plugin.

Mozilla announced that the Firefox 69 will no longer support Adobe Flash due to a large number of serious flaws exploited by hackers in attacks across the years. The decision was made public for the first time by Adobe in July 2018, the software giant declared it would stop using Flash Player and stop providing security updates by the end of 2020.

Many vulnerabilities in the popular plugin were being actively exploited in cyber attacks in the wild.

“We are now scheduled to disable Flash in Firefox 69 which moves to the Stable release on August 3rd. The change will land in the 69 Nightly cycle and ride the trains.” reads the Firefox/Roadmap/Updates page.

In July 2017, Adobe announced plans to completely kill Flash and stop providing security updates for it by the end of 2020.

Since August 2017, starting with Mozilla FireFox 55 it was possible to use Flash only explicitly activating the plugin.

“Made the Adobe Flash plugin click-to-activate by default and allowed only on http:// and https:// URL schemes.” explained Mozilla at the time.

So it is official, from 2020 Mozilla will no more support Flash in the consumer versions of Firefox, only the Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) will continue to support it until the end of 2020.

“2019 – Firefox will disable the Flash plugin by default. Users will not be prompted to enable Flash, but it will still be possible to activate Flash on certain sites using browser settings.” reads the Plugin RoadMap.

“2020 – In early 2020, Flash support will be completely removed from consumer versions of Firefox. The Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) will continue to support for Flash until the end of 2020.

2021 – When Adobe stops shipping security updates for Flash at the end of 2020, Firefox will refuse to load the plugin”

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Firefox 69, Flash)

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