Mozilla, maker of Firefox, has confirmed that the company will enable Click to Play for all users from March 31, 2014. In a post on Mozilla’s security blog, the company said that it “strongly [encourages] site authors to phase out their use of plugins” due to new Web technologies that make plugins less essential and the effect they can have on browser stability.
Mozilla continued in the post to say that the change is also due to these stability problems. The company said that it knows “plugins are a significant source of poor performance, crashes and security vulnerabilities” and because of this “plugins present real costs to Firefox users.”
Plugin developers have 30 days to submit a request to join a plugin whitelist, which will exempt them from the Click to Play changes and allow their plugins to load without user interaction.
Mozilla pointed out that the plugin whitelist is only temporary and will whitelist a single plugin for four consecutive Firefox releases. After that, developers are encouraged to move away to web based technologies or will need to apply for a continued exemption.
Some plugins, such as Adobe Flash, will be permanently exempt from the Click to Play functionality but only for the very latest version of the player. Older versions will revert to requiring users to Click to Play or will require them to update the plugin to use content.
