It's time to remove plugin support from Firefox mobile

[Kevin Brosnan]

Now is not the time.

We still struggle to get mobile content served to us by websites/servers.

Our h264 decoding on Android is still a work in progress. There are 
devices that are blocked from trying h264 [1]. We (FxA QA) are in the 
process of doing a review of our playback on 70+ devices we have on 
hand. The issues we have found so far are listed on a meta bug [2].

We regularly get 5 star reviews on the Play Store because of our Flash 
support. Removing it before Adobe EoL Flash will result in negative 
reviews and some of the positive reviews to change to 1 or 2 star reviews.

Kevin Brosnan

[1] 
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers#On_Android_2
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=867846

On 05/10/2013 10:54 AM, David Keeler wrote:
> [bcc'd to many lists for wide visibility - discussion should probably be
> on mobile.firefox.dev
> (https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mobile-firefox-dev )]
>
> TL;DR: Now is a good time to remove plugin support from Firefox for Android.
>
> Consider:
> * We do not support plugins for Firefox OS and do not plan to
> * The only plugin that most users care about is Flash. Adobe stopped
> development for Flash on Android in November of 2011, which is a year
> and a half ago[1].
> * Popular sites that use plugins have native apps. This includes
> YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and so on. Other sites can follow suit or use
> modern web technologies like HTML5. Addons are also an option.
> * Plugins are a security hazard
> * Plugins drain battery life and make Firefox seem slow
>
> Let's be bold, let's protect our users, and let's move the web forward.
>
> [1] http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html
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