The slow death of the old-style browser plug-in continues. Earlier this week we saw Google announce plans to eliminate NPAPI plug-ins by 2014, and now there’s a similar schedule from the Mozilla team that builds Firefox.
Firefox users will now be asked if they want to enable plug-ins the first time they try to launch them. The one exception will be Flash, which will remain enabled by default. (Chrome also leaves Flash in place, since it runs there as a modern plug-in.)
Unlike the Chrome team, Mozilla hasn’t yet set a date for when plug-ins will be disallowed altogether. However, the project is actively discouraging site developers from using plug-ins, pointing out the lack of support for them on mobile devices and the stability issues they create on many machines. We’re not quite in an all-HTML5 world yet, but we’re getting closer.
Plugin Activation in Firefox [Mozilla Future Releases]
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