UPDATE: Adobe has patched two critical vulnerabilities. Read more from Adobe here.
Original story follows.
Adobe’s Flash has seen better days. First, it was Facebook’s new chief security officer Alex Stamos calling for the end of Flash.
It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2015
Even if 18 months from now, one set date is the only way to disentangle the dependencies and upgrade the whole ecosystem at once. — Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2015
Last night, Mozilla dropped the hammer.
BIG NEWS!! All versions of Flash are blocked by default in Firefox as of now. https://t.co/4SjVoqKPrR #tech #infosec pic.twitter.com/VRws3L0CBW
— Mark Schmidt (@MarkSchmidty) July 14, 2015
Fire up your Firefox right now and you’ll notice Flash is disabled by default.
Why? Several vulnerabilities were recently discovered when 400GB of security firm Hacking Team’s documents and product source code were leaked.
Adobe has acknowledged the issue and said a fix is coming this week.
As for Mozilla? Head of Firefox Support Mark Schmidt says the Flash block is only temporary. Once Adobe releases a fix, Flash will be unblocked. You can enable Flash right now if you want through the settings menu.
Flash’s struggles
Flash’s days are numbered. Every year, major security vulnerabilities are discovered. Adobe fixes them, but trust in the software is waning. Google’s YouTube ditched it in favor of HTML5. Hell, even Adobe halted active development of Flash Player for mobile in 2011.
HTML5 is better than Flash. Period. The quicker everyone moves to HTLM5 the better.
Mozilla’s move to temporary block Flash might not kill it today. But, Flash’s place on the internet will end sooner rather than later.