Mozilla: 'no plans' to bundle Flash with Firefox

Unlike Google, Mozilla says it's not committed to the idea of integrating Adobe Flash with its web browser. "Mozilla has no current plans to bundle Flash with Firefox downloads," the open source outfit said in an email to The Reg. "Mozilla has always made it easy to install Flash and other plugins via the Automatic Plugin …

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera?

Do Opera still bundle Flash with the installer?

I remember they started doing this in the late 1990s but I never kept track whether they stopped or not.

It seemed a good idea to keep the plugins up to date and patched, but was a bit of a waste of bandwidth if you were only downloading a bug fix version that contained the same Flash plugin.

But now we live in the age of automatic updates, Opera & Co could all update Flash only when a new version is available. All disable-able in the preferences, of course so that no mission critical web apps break.

[Matthew 4]

"buggy," littered with security holes"

Funny, sounds exactly like OSX to me.

[Michael Jones]

Are you sure....

...but as a recent Mac convert, I'm more than happy with it's stability. Admittedly Windows is better than it was, but I think I'll be sticking to OSX from now on. That is all!

[DZ-Jay]

Where's the "Zap Account" button?

Do I have to wait until the next 1st April?

-dZ.

[Rod MacLean]

@Matthew 4

You've made it obvious that you're a windows fanboi.

I've been using OSX for 7 years and it's crashed three times in total. Twice it was due to Flash.

Now, Windows on the other hand I've been using since 1995 and I have to admit that it crashed more times than that in the first week (in fact, it crashed as soon as I plugged my scanner in while setting it up!)

I've yet to see El Reg post any articles about OSX exploits in the wild. Look for examples of Windows exploits and you'd be here all day!!

[Radelix]

Hey look at my OS wang!!!!!

Every bloody time "well my (OS of choice) is far better than (your OS of choice). Please fanbois ohh please just stop. Why must you soil my morning reading. All OS's crash once you put a load on them at some point. Software is buggy and sometimes handles things improperly.

So to close, (your OS of choice) sucks, mines better.

/rant

p.s. I'm aware of the irony

[Anonymous Coward]

lmao

They should be doing as much as possible in the opposite direction, lets have a "burn all flash" day! Time for HTML5 to take over that crap!!

[heyrick]

Flash will be around for a while yet...

While there are two schools of thought on the <video> tag, Flash will be around still. Don't forget, systems distributed to the true theory of OSS will not support H.264 out of the box, much as Ubuntu does not support MP3 out of the box. Installing such will probably be fairly trivial, but an annoyance.

Does <video> support captioning? Annotations? All the crap we're used to in a Flash player? Will it scale correctly on my 16:9 aspect display (a number of video products "just assume" the aspect ratio, so it all goes wrong when in full-screen mode). Do you get to pick a "quality"?

The <video> tag is young. It'll be a while before it can supplant Flash. And, in some cases, like mini-Powerpoint style explanations (i.e. "what a clock does in a processor") would only work well with Flash. You could, I suppose, use Java, but that means loading up the entire JVM. While converting it to video would be seriously retrograde - eighty times bigger and no longer interactive... Flash does have its purposes.

[heyrick]

Thank you, El Reg!

What with recent revelations that Chrome is chatting back every keypress in the URL bar (WTF?), and now that updates are pushed out silently...

...I have enough reasons to never install the bugger.

Again. For I tried it a few weeks back, and uninstalled it less than a minute later, for it and its 47Mb installer stuck themselves in \Documents and Settings\<name>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google - WTF? What's wrong with Program Files like everything else? Or maybe Chrome can't handle multi-user setups? It's the first time in my life I've seen an app install itself to that location. Oh, and the Google installer just "did it" with no input from me. It never asked *where* I'd like to install...

I would Fail icon for Google, but after what they've just done to YouTube, there aren't enough Epic Fail euphemisms to describe it. So heart for El Reg for giving solid reasons to avoid it like it has H1N1... ;-)

[Tom 7]

Flashblock

one way of getting the horse and cart off the information highway.

[Shaun Forsyth]

Firefox Finds and installs flash plugins?

It maybe just me, however has this ever worked.. it never finds it for me?

[heyrick]

Manky Flash installer

It did work, but around about December the Adobe installer that you're supposed to use went tits-in-the-air. I don't see why I need to download a program to download a program, so I removed the lot and did it manually.

I don't think it is Firefox that is borked, rather yet another example of Adobe wisdom...

You can always get it at http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and don't forget to turn off the automatic "Yes, I want McAfee! Pleeeze, pleeeeze, pleeeeze with cherries on top!" option.

[bothwell]

Not just you

It's never worked for me either, for as long as I can remember. Always got to go to Adobe and install it manually.

TBH that suits me even better than "add me magically from somewhere!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Mozilla: 'no plans' to bundle Flash with Firefox

good - google bundling it with Chrome is one extra reason it is not going anywhere near my PCs

[Joel Fiser]

Google's Embrace

Flashers welcome The Google Embrace!

Now c'mon, we all know plugins are the only true solution to cross-browser - cross-platform...

Let's just all be buds and promote what's good for The Web.

SilverLight too - the new Web can easily accommodate both.

Flash is The Future...

Do you think web pages are going to be more HTML-like or more iPhone-style liquidity - like you get with Flash?

[aaronFranco]

Plug-in Revolution

Interesting article and it does a nice job of simply conveying the technical information. It is nice to see such skilled "to the point" writing in the technical community. I do have one objection.

Flash is not "advertising technology". Adobe Flash is a runtime environment for software distribution over the internet. Granted, it has been grossly misused by the advertising community over the years, but it in no way qualifies as "advertising technology".

The reason behind this move by Google is due to its partnership with Adobe in The Open Screen Project. We have done extensive research on Flash Technology and the rumors / debates circulating the web today. See our blog for detailed information:

http://blog.nothinggrinder.com/id-rather-be-a-woz

[Alastair 7]

Re: Thank you, El Reg

"For I tried it a few weeks back, and uninstalled it less than a minute later, for it and its 47Mb installer stuck themselves in \Documents and Settings\<name>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google - WTF? What's wrong with Program Files like everything else?"

They're two distinct locations for two separate purposes. Program Files is for, wait for it, program files. Application Data? You can work out what that's for. Of course it handles multi-user setups, that's the entire point of using your personal Application Data folder. This is how programs are SUPPOSED to work, so that limited accounts can still meaningfully run applications. Dump everything in Program Files and suddenly limited account users can't save anything.

But please, carry on with the uninformed rant.

[Fred Mbogo]

Really?

Flash the future?

If Adobe got on with the program, they would have released a bloody 64bit version of Flash, for Minefield.

[Tom 13]

Wow, imagine that. The company that owns Youtube

is bundling Flash with their browser. Who'd a thunk?

[Captain Thyratron]

Hi from w3m.

As described.

[jon 77]

@Fred Mbogo

yeah, and actually released flash for symbian and all others!!

- instaed of just talking about it...

Open Source people!!!!! what are you doing??? can you do it for us????

[Brennan Young]

This is about MSIE I think

This is not just about ads.

MS were terrified of liveconnect because of the threat of seamless communication between plugins and javascript, which would have abstracted the OS away behind the browser, hence their (successful, but unlawful attempt to derail it).

Google sees the extended functionality in the browser offered by ActionScript 3 as yet another nail in the coffin for Windows. They know they wont get everyone on board HTML5 and Ajax, so Flash serves them in the sense that it can help make Windows irrelevant when running browser-based 'cloud' (ugh) applications. (You can do a quite decent asynchronous browser app in Flash, it's just that generally, people don't).

For strategy reasons, it's unlikely they will give silverlight the same special treatment.