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Microsoft Security The Internet

Flash Will Soon Be 'Click-To-Run' in Microsoft Edge (bleepingcomputer.com) 72

Microsoft is following in the footsteps of other browser makers such as Apple, Google, and Mozilla, and says that upcoming Edge browser versions will favor HTML5 over Flash by default. From a report on BleepingComputer: "Sites that support HTML5 will default to a clean HTML5 experience," Microsoft said today. "In these cases, Flash will not even be loaded, improving performance, battery life, and security." On sites where Flash is needed, users will be prompted using a popup like the one seen below. Edge will ask users only once, and the browser will remember the user's choice for subsequent visits. Microsoft has already pushed these changes to Edge users on Windows Insiders builds. Regular Windows users will receive this update in the coming weeks.
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Flash Will Soon Be 'Click-To-Run' in Microsoft Edge

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  • ...when I want to log into my Microsoft sites, like OneDrive
  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @03:52PM (#53486041)

    but on older devices, Flash media playback is faster. So much so that I can still watch Youtube videos fullscreen on my older Atom-powered netbook with Flash, when the HTML5 player is choppy and horrible in Firefox. If only they made it a tad faster just for fullscreen video playback, I'd uninstall Flash in a jiffy. But it's not gonna happen. Still, while I can, I'm holding onto Flash just for that, because my netbook ain't fast but it works fine.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      You have noticed Firefox is kind of horrible at pretty much everything now right? Try it with Chrome instead and see if HTML5 playback isn't better. I'm not a fan more Google, just disappointed and irritated with FF getting shittier every micro-upgrade.

      • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:00PM (#53486117)

        I'd rather suffer a million Firefoxes than anything coming from Google. Besides, I'm using Palemoon, which is a less sucky version of Firefox.

        • by OhPlz ( 168413 )

          One of the more recent updates to Palemoon made the HTML video work a whole lot better. Before that, yea.. it was almost unusable.

        • I'm using Palemoon, which is a less sucky version of Firefox.

          I've been looking at Palemoon a lot lately...what's the deal in terms of Firefox plugins / extensions, can you use them, or some of them?

          I'd definitely consider switching if it can support NoScript and Adblock, plus maybe one or two others. But NoScript and Adblock are "must haves".

      • by narcc ( 412956 )

        You don't want to run Chrome on an older computer. It's been unusable on low-end machines for years now.

        FireFox, or one of those weird forks, is your best bet on older hardware.

    • Dude it's 2016.

      If your GPU can't do h.264/5 acceleration then it probably won't run Windows 10 that well or at all. That includes 2008 era netbooks. Modern Atom's do h.264 just fine at 1080P. Your phone has had hardware acceleration for years now.

      I had a coworker who owned a single core Atom from 2008. He returned it 3 days later as it couldn't even use Netflix on such a device.

      • by tepples ( 727027 )

        Which 10 inch "modern Atom" laptops are any good, for someone seeking to replace a 2008-2010 single core Atom laptop with something newer but not larger?

        • I did have a surface 3. It was nice but it was short lived as someone stole it. It had the latest atom which was a quad core chip. Yes it was slow if you opened more than a few tabs of Chrome. However, it played Netflix in 1080P just fine and smooth without over heating and was great for Office work too.

          Intel no longer makes the Atom and now makes an m3 as it's predecessor. I believe they are dual core with hyper threading for light work

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      Also, we need HTML5 blocker and on demand options.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Flash has always been a disease. A secondary infection that enables a shockwave delivered pozzing of your machine. It is the HIV of the internet. This analogy is infinitely extensible.

    Captcha: echelon. I have no regrets.

  • The problem with Edge is there is no plugin mechanism to block ads. If someone developed a way to use hosts files to block ads I would use that. Anyone ever heard of anything like that?
  • Yet again, let's upgrade the whole OS to get new features in the browser!
    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Yet again, let's upgrade the whole OS to get new features in the browser!

      Microsoft 101

      They play a jillion games to get you to upgrade shit. For example, they may support their very own older languages and tools, but it gets incrementally more difficult to support them, requiring goofball configuration fiddling.

      At first I thought it was just incompetence on MS's part, but looking at the pattern of their entropy, it's pretty clear it's intentional. For example, it may be a well-documented problem and accumula

  • by The-Ixian ( 168184 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:16PM (#53486229)

    I am running Windows 10 on my gaming box.

    I launched Firefox (my main web browser still) as normal and I got a little tooltip thing stating that Edge is some % safer than Firefox against "social engineering attacks" WTF does that mean?

    I launch Chrome (used for Netflix and other streaming) and get the same message with a different (lower) % safer tooltip.

    Dually noted MS... thanks /rolleyes

    • It means Microsoft will infect and/or cripple Firefox if you don't switch. Seeing as how they're (obviously) already monitoring your system processes and applications in order to heckle you, I suspect it won't be very long in coming.

  • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:21PM (#53486257) Journal

    The prompt asks "Do you want to run Flash for this site..." [paraphrased]

    Ideally it should show a prompt or marker at the spot(s) on the page where the Flash markup is. Otherwise, it's hard to know what you are confirming, and you are confirming every Flash reference on the page once you confirm.

    You may enable it to view a video, for example, but could also be opening up Flash spam on the side. Spammers will master this trick of baiting. Page-level confirmation is too course a confirmation granularity.

  • by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @05:32PM (#53486711)
    After all, copying is in their genes.
  • Welcome (Score:4, Funny)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @05:32PM (#53486713) Journal

    Hey Microsoft, 2005 just called and congratulated you for all the innovation and stuff.

  • This post will be hugely unpopular to the point of me being called stupid or moronic, but I'm gonna spell it out anyways.

    Even today HTML5 is nowhere near feature complete, fast and reliable as Adobe Flash is. In many ways ActionScript is better [stackoverflow.com] than JavaScript. Adobe Flash has powerful tools of dealing with streaming video/audio (including realtime bandwidth tuning), fast forwarding/rewinding and setting various video attributes. It's a lot easier to create complete solutions using Adobe Flash than to creat

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      Sure, but then you must update Flash every damn week because, and this is the tricky bit, it has provably more bugs than the code contains.

      Some might call this a logical contradiction, but Adobe has worked hard on making this so. The only problem is, they cannot explain the contradiction, it just is.

    • For Flash games, I 100% agree.

      i.e. Normally I hate Tower Defense games but these ones are gems (pardon the pun)

      * Gemcraft Chapter 0 [kongregate.com]
      * Desktop Tower Defense [kongregate.com]

    • Most of the stuff you say is utter bullshit.

      In many ways ActionScript is better [stackoverflow.com] than JavaScript

      Actionscript doesn't have a modern execution engine and is terribly slow. Additional to that, that comparison is from 2010 and outdated by today's standards. If you really need those features, use the Typescript superset and compile it to javascript. Same result, just faster execution as js has actually fast interpreters and jit (ActionScript hasn't).

      Adobe Flash just plays video/audio formats it's intended to play, vs. the dreaded HTML5 message, "Your browser doesn't support this media type" specially on platforms other than Windows.

      This was an issue some time ago (when firefox didn't support h.264, but it changed in 2014...). Now you can use h.2

  • I'm sure the 7 people who use Microsoft Edge probably care. To the rest of the universe, this is non-news. :)
  • Install Firefox. Install NoScript [noscript.net]. Poof! You now have click-to-activate on all plugins -- not just Flash, but Java, Silverlight, and others. Moreover, you authorize each occurrence of the plugin on the page, i.e. you can run the video player, but keep the frame with the Flash ads disabled.

    Yes, Microsoft, very "innovative"... (*derisive snort*)

  • Since 2004

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]

    For other browsers and platforms too

    'nuf said

  • They are doing a thing, so this must be EEE!!!
    Nevermind it's something that we applaud when others do!
    Nevermind that it's in favor of open standards rather than closed source!
    Micro$oft did it, therefore it is bad. Let me just move these goalposts to prove my (new) point.

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas l'Informatique. -- Bosquet [on seeing the IBM 4341]

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