Mozilla Firefox will no longer support Adobe Flash Player

Firefox
(Image credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla has announced that version 84 of Firefox will be the last to ship with full support for Flash Player, marking yet another step towards the Adobe software's final days. 

Mozilla stated security and performance improvements as a reason for the decision, with confirmation that Flash Support will not be included when Firefox 85 is released on January 26 2021.

Goodbye, Flash

It's hardly a secret that Mozilla has been looking to remove Adobe Flash from its browser for some time now. Flash has been slowly crawling towards its demise since Adobe made an announcement back in 2017 that it would end support for Flash Player on December 31 2020, with major web browsers such as  Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome confirming that the program will be removed to improve security and performance.

Whilst many of us may have fond memories of the software, we shouldn't be trying to hold onto obsolete software for the sake of nostalgia. There are now many open standards like HTML5 and WebAssebly that provide the same capabilities and functionalities that plugins such as Flash first pioneered.

You also won't be able to manually install Flash in Firefox 85, and nor should you want to. Bugs and cybersecurity threats are a large reason that the software is being axed, and the web will be a safer, faster place without it. After years of conceding to peer pressure to keep updating the deprecated software, Adobe can finally drag it's problematic plugin towards its final resting place.

Via MS Poweruser

Jess Weatherbed

Jess is a former TechRadar Computing writer, where she covered all aspects of Mac and PC hardware, including PC gaming and peripherals. She has been interviewed as an industry expert for the BBC, and while her educational background was in prosthetics and model-making, her true love is in tech and she has built numerous desktop computers over the last 10 years for gaming and content creation. Jess is now a journalist at The Verge.