Mozilla Joins Google and Facebook in Phasing Out Adobe Flash

Web browsers don’t like the security and stability problems that come with Flash.

Another popular web browser has had it with Adobe Flash.

Mozilla said this week that it plans to gradually wean its Firefox web browser from Adobe’s ADBE -1.07% multimedia player. In August, Firefox will no longer support “certain Flash content” that it deems “not essential to the user experience,” although Mozilla did not specify what type of Flash content it was referring to.

Mozilla will still support “legacy Flash content” for an unspecified time, but the company urged websites that use Flash or Microsoft MSFT -0.25% Silverlight, another multimedia web player similar to Flash, for their videos or online games to adopt newer “HTML technologies as soon as possible.”

In May, Google GOOG -0.59% detailed its plans to end support of Flash for its Chrome web browser, and it hopes to completely rid itself of Flash advertisements by the beginning of 2017.

Google, like Adobe, is urging website operators to switch to the HTML5 coding language to display multimedia like video on their sites.

Flash is notoriously buggy and prone to many security vulnerabilities. Firefox believes that by ending support for Flash, its users will see “enhanced security, improved battery life, faster page load, and better browser responsiveness.”

Still, Mozilla is not totally cutting ties with Adobe. Mozilla said it would “continue to work closely with Adobe to deliver the best possible Flash experience for our users” as it phases the multimedia player out, and said that an engineering partnership between the two companies has improved some performance and stability in Firefox when it displays Flash content.

Last summer, Facebook’s FB -0.27% chief security officer Alex Stamos urged Adobe via Twitter to disable Flash because of its security vulnerabilities.

In April, Adobe issued an emergency update to Flash after security researchers found a flaw that allowed hackers to distribute so-called ransomware to owners of Microsoft Windows personal computers. Ransomware is basically a form of malware that lets hackers block people from accessing their computer or related computer networks so that a hacker can demand payment in return for access.

In 2010, legendary Apple AAPL -1.32% CEO Steve Jobs wrote a 1,700 word essay on Flash and why Apple’s problems with the multimedia player, which he claimed hurt the “reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads.”