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

> 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.

I agree that we can't treat it like any other plugin right now, but that should be our goal to get to that point?

> 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.

I agree, in fact I'm not sure we would even be able to have this discussion now without mobile cutting into Flash. A quick count on statcounter indicates we have about as many people browsing with Firefox as on all mobile devices.  Firefox can make it so not just the mobile version of the site is Flash free.
 
> > 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.

I don't see this being substantially different from the click-to-play being implemented for other plugins (except affecting more sites).  As you know, the click to play implementation has had some nice refinements since that test.

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

I see that as a temporary workaround, and the longer term goal being have everyone code in HTML/CSS/JS directly.  I want Flash to stop being used on the web, not just in Firefox.

> 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.

I guess I've had a similar experience (automatic fallback) with Gnash and Lightspark and found it very lacking.  Slightly broken content is much more jarring (to me at least) then the Click-to-play view.

Anyway, I'm happy to do the work to get us some hard telemetry data on this as you described previously.  (I might start with top sites just to double check feasibility.)  What results would change your mind about this?  (aka how many broken sites are considered acceptable)

Thanks,
Bryan