MANILA, Philippines – Adobe Flash has been in hot water recently ever since a security breach at spyware company Hacking Team was uncovered, with Flash posing serious vulnerabilities for users after hacking exploit kits were spotted taking advantage of flaws in Flash.

Alex Stamos, Facebook’s security chief, tweeted Monday, July 13, that he would like Flash to be gone eventually.

His tweet read, “It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day.”

Even if 18 months from now, one set date is the only way to disentangle the dependencies and upgrade the whole ecosystem at once.

— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2015

Stamos added that such an end date for the life of Flash doesn’t need to be immediate, it only needs to be made so as to spur upgrades to the entire computing ecosystem by that set date.

Mozilla Firefox blocks Flash

For its part, Mozilla has taken steps to keep security up by keeping Flash out. It has added Flash, up to its most recent version, to its Mozilla Firefox blocklist.

GHacks.net explained that “the blocklist lists browser extensions, plugins and other components that are blocked automatically by Firefox either directly or sometimes in the case of plugins, by setting them to ‘ask to activate.'”

This “Ask to Activate” usage case would mean that, in the case of certain Flash functions, such as Shockwave Flash, users would need to manually activate a toggle just to run Flash.

Users can learn more about Mozilla’s blocking of Flash on its Bugzilla page for the block. – Rappler.com

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