In an effort to increase speed and security of Firefox, Mozilla will be updating their browser to run plugins on an on demand basis. This new feature is called Click to Play and should be rolling out to Firefox soon.
Previously, plugins were automatically loaded when a website requested it. Now Silverlight, Java, Adobe Reader and outdated Flash plugins will automatically be blocked until a user clicks to request it. Flash will still be loaded automatically as many sites require it for navigation.
Click to Play will be customizable so you can tell specific sites to load plugins automatically if you need a plugin to run all the time.
In a blog post, Mozilla’s Michael Coates explained the reasoning behind Click to Play:
Poorly designed third party plugins are the number one cause of crashes in Firefox and can severely degrade a user’s experience on the Web. This is often seen in pauses while plugins are loaded and unloaded, high memory usage while browsing, and many unexpected crashes of Firefox. By only activating plugins that the user desires to load, we’re helping eliminate pauses, crashes and other consequences of unwanted plugins.
This is a nice addition and should make Firefox perform quicker. There is currently no release date for Click to Play.
Source: Mozilla
