Mozilla Firefox 85 Kills Support for Adobe Flash Player

Mozilla has released an updated version Firefox 85. This new version has ended the support for Adobe Flash Player plugin and “protects” users from supercookies. Firefox 85 is no more supporting the Adobe Flash neither have a setting to re-enable it. It was a pre-decided move. Mozilla announced in 2017 that it will end the support for Adobe Flash Player in Firefox 85.

Mozilla Firefox 85 Kills Support for Adobe Flash Player

Other than that, the latest version of Firefox also comes with a biggest change and that is the crackdown on supercookies. These are the trackers which stay hidden in the browser and track you online even after you clear cookies.

Mozilla said, “In short, supercookies can be used in place of ordinary cookies to store user identifiers, but they are much more difficult to delete and block. This makes it nearly impossible for users to protect their privacy as they browse the web. Over the years, trackers have been found storing user identifiers as supercookies in increasingly obscure parts of the browser, including in Flash storage, ETags, and HSTS flags. The changes we’re making in Firefox 85 greatly reduce the effectiveness of cache-based supercookies by eliminating a tracker’s ability to use them across websites.”

The company said that the purpose of ending support for Adobe Flash is to bring improved performance and security. Moreover, back in 2017, Adobe itself announced that it would no longer support Flash Player after 2020, and would introduce better and secure options that include HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly.

For further protection of users from connection-based tracking, Firefox 85 has also partitioned the pooled connections, prefetch connections, preconnect connections, speculative connections, and TLS session identifiers.

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