“To be clear, Flash is only blocked until Adobe releases a version which isn’t being actively exploited by publicly known vulnerabilities”, Schmidt said.
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Attackers were known to use vulnerabilities in Flash to install malicious software on computers and steal data, it added.
The first, CVE-2015-5122, patches an issue from the Hacking Team leak that details “constructs for exploiting the Use-After-Free vulnerability in DisplayObject.opaqueBackground”.
Many leading websites have now dropped the insecure, resource-hungry Flash in favour of HTML5 for multimedia playback.
Facebook’s head of security has also called for Adobe to kill off Flash, because vulnerabilities are being exploited by hackers.
Even aside from security, Adobe Flash can slow down your computer and cause annoyances when it fails to update.
That meant that all users of Firefox could not access Flash content because they could not turn the plug-in on.
Alex Stamos the security chief with Facebook tweeted that it was time for Adobe to call it quits for Flash.
Adobe Flash is dead.
The fact that Mozilla chose user security over a more polished experience is significant and sets it apart from competing third-party browsers. However, Google does limit Flash’s interaction with the rest of the browser via a security sandbox.
Apart from disabling the plugin in his company’s own browser, Mozilla CEO Mark Schmidt is also targeting Google for not following in his company’s footsteps i.e. disabling flash plugin.
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The Mail notes that Apple has not supported Flash on its iOS since 2010, when co-founder Steve Jobs decided it had poor performance, “abysmal security” and a negative impact on battery life. According to tech survey firm We3Techs, less than 11% of websites now use Flash. In that essay, Jobs said – among other things – that Flash was insecure, inefficient and not going to come anywhere near his mobile devices.
