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Besides the obvious security benefits, this also makes sense as part of Mozilla's HTML5 campaign. By getting users to think of plugin-based content as "foreign"

Besides the obvious security benefits, this also makes sense as part of Mozilla's HTML5 campaign. By getting users to think of plugin-based content as "foreign" and "inconvenient," they bolster users' opinions of pure Web-based content. However, by allowing a simple clickthrough, they hopefully prevent users from just getting frustrated and switching to Chrome.

Silhouette 14y ago
The trouble is that many new web technologies, including those that certain groups (particularly Apple, Google and Mozilla) are pushing as "replacements" for older technologies, aren't actually as good as how we used to do things. For example, HTML5 audio and video work up to a point, but compared to Flash players they are onerous to support because of different data formats and limited in their functionality. Of course, Flash has other uses, too. It was very annoying recently to find that none of the popular weather services I wanted to check during the recent cold spell here in the UK were fully accessible from my iPad, because they all used Flash for their interactive maps. And it wasn't the weather services I was annoyed with, it was the £500 paperweight that couldn't even do stuff that worked in IE6 on a 10-year-old computer. Likewise, things like canvas and SVG are fine up to a point, but they offer relatively limited drawing functionality compared to a Flash or Java applet, and the available functionality differs widely across browsers. And of course in Java's case, you can write an applet in several modern JVM-hosted languages that are vastly superior to Javascript for implementing non-trivial visualisations, and with much faster performance than even the best current Javascript engines. Give up plug-ins and use HTML5 and Javascript. Brought to you by the people who said we should use CSS instead of tables but then couldn't implement trivial grid layouts, or maybe by the guys who said we should use CSS instead of graphics but then complained that everyone's buttons looked like Bootstrap.

Silhouette 14y ago

The trouble is that many new web technologies, including those that certain groups (particularly Apple, Google and Mozilla) are pushing as "replacements" for older technologies, aren't actually as good as how we used to do things. For example, HTML5 audio and video work up to a point, but compared to Flash players they are onerous to support because of different data formats and limited in their functionality. Of course, Flash has other uses, too. It was very annoying recently to find that none of the popular weather services I wanted to check during the recent cold spell here in the UK were fully accessible from my iPad, because they all used Flash for their interactive maps. And it wasn't the weather services I was annoyed with, it was the £500 paperweight that couldn't even do stuff that worked in IE6 on a 10-year-old computer. Likewise, things like canvas and SVG are fine up to a point, but they offer relatively limited drawing functionality compared to a Flash or Java applet, and the available functionality differs widely across browsers. And of course in Java's case, you can write an applet in several modern JVM-hosted languages that are vastly superior to Javascript for implementing non-trivial visualisations, and with much faster performance than even the best current Javascript engines. Give up plug-ins and use HTML5 and Javascript. Brought to you by the people who said we should use CSS instead of tables but then couldn't implement trivial grid layouts, or maybe by the guys who said we should use CSS instead of graphics but then complained that everyone's buttons looked like Bootstrap.