Re: What's the long term plan with Click-to-play and Flash?

On 6/2/14, 1:12 PM, [email protected] wrote:
>> What is the problem you are trying to solve, and why do you think this
>> proposal will solve it?
> 1. Make it crystal clear that Mozilla wants Flash to go away and that developers should stop making new things in it.  And that Flash will eventually be treated just like every other plugin.

We definitely want Flash to go away. But it isn't like every other 
plugin, and we need to be realistic about that. It's penetration into 
all parts of the web, advertising and no, is far greater than other 
plugins. And especially it's still common to use "hidden" Flash 
instances to do web enhancements in ways that make click-to-activate UI 
tricky for many users.

>    
> 2. Get the web more in shape for the fact that Firefox on Linux will lose Adobe's Flash in 3 years.  (I'm a Linux user so it's personal :P )

A lot of the web will end up like that pretty soon regardless, with the 
major mobile OSes not having Flash support. There's a lot more leverage 
there than there is on our desktop Flash policies.

>   From user research, we know that some users expect advertisements in
> the page, and when we tried blocking Flash, these users were confused
> about why the page didn't look right and were unhappy that we broke the web.
> They were confused by the Click-to-play part?  When was this test?
January 2013.

>
> Most sites that I view nowadays look totally fine if Flash are blocked.
You and I probably have a different perspective on this than most 
people. That's why we do user research in the first place. Since many 
people don't even understand that Flash is a plugin separate from the 
browser, they had serious trouble understanding why we were asking them 
to click just to play the videos and see the ads.

>
>> Our current strategy is to continue development of Shumway to the point
>> where it displays most web content reliably and performs acceptably, and
>> then try to switch users to Shumway with a fallback to "real" Flash if
>> we detect incompatible content. I believe that will be the best way to
>> solve the privacy issues with Flash without causing pain to our users.
> That does help solve the privacy issues with Flash, but does nothing to make developers stop using Flash.

That's true, but does it matter? You can view the content correctly 
without a binary plugin.

> I also don't think Shumway can ever fully implement Flash (think DRM bits), so this has a long term plan that still includes Adobe Flash.  If the advertisers have a choice that they can ask for the unimplementable bits of Flash to get the plugin (and therefore mitigate any privacy protections) they would totally do that.
It is true that there are some specific Flash APIs that we cannot 
implement. These include some codecs (VP6, Sorenson) and the DRM bits of 
Flash. These are not used by advertising sites much, and so we have a 
good migration path for most content.

As for the question of whether and how we'd do fallback, we don't know 
yet. We might not decide to do automatic fallback but require a click to 
activate in those cases: that should fix the drive-by case and fix the 
advertising landscape without unduly affecting other content. We still 
need to experiment with that once Shumway performance and compatibility 
is farther along.

--BDS