Firefox to block content based on Java, Reader, and Silverlight
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The problem was that you had to, as the article says, "click" to play content. This was fine on YouTube, Netflix, etc., since there was a very obvious visual cue about how to activate your content [2]. However, not all sites had such obvious cues. SoundCloud, for example, would just silently fail, and I would have to manually disable the feature to get it to play (in practice, I just loaded the URL in Chrome).
Since Firefox 18, this has been much better. Now, there is an area next to the address bar that you can use to enable content, even if there is nothing on the actual page that you can click [3]. When you click this area, a pop-up appears asking which plugins you would like to load, and if you would like to always allow plugins on that site.
This pop-up is hidden for the most part, and isn't trivially discoverable[4] - something Mozilla really needs to work on - but it does pop-up the very first time you encounter a page with blocked content (per Firefox session, it seems), so there is at least some notification that you can unblock content.
If they're planning on having this feature enabled by default, I really doubt it will be the end of the world for most people. They'll just click the notification, and play through.
[1] Set the value of `plugins.click_to_play` to `true`. If it doesn't exist, create a new Boolean value for it, setting the name/value as above.
[2] http://i.imgur.com/jhxqoJ9.png
[3] http://i.imgur.com/RNXw1JO.png
[4] Admittedly, this could be because I'm using a non-default theme on my install, so perhaps this is more obvious by default. I haven't checked.
SoundCloud have actually since added a detector, and will warn you saying "It looks like you have a Flash blocker browser setting or extension. Please enable Flash to hear sound." Also, whereas before the Flash element was invisible, now there's a target to click on if you do have Flash content blocked. Very well done actually.
I saw that warning earlier today when I made my comment (note that the screenshot of the enabler pop-up shows SoundCloud as the URL), and thought maybe I had just missed it before.
Alas, I just tried an actual sound page, and the result was as before. I didn't see any "click to play" items, and clicking around the page (on obvious targets like the Play button, and less obvious targets like the progress bar and times) revealed nothing either. Where do you see the new target?
For example, HTML5 audio and video work up to a point, but compared to Flash players they are onerous to support because of different data formats and limited in their functionality.
Of course, Flash has other uses, too. It was very annoying recently to find that none of the popular weather services I wanted to check during the recent cold spell here in the UK were fully accessible from my iPad, because they all used Flash for their interactive maps. And it wasn't the weather services I was annoyed with, it was the £500 paperweight that couldn't even do stuff that worked in IE6 on a 10-year-old computer.
Likewise, things like canvas and SVG are fine up to a point, but they offer relatively limited drawing functionality compared to a Flash or Java applet, and the available functionality differs widely across browsers. And of course in Java's case, you can write an applet in several modern JVM-hosted languages that are vastly superior to Javascript for implementing non-trivial visualisations, and with much faster performance than even the best current Javascript engines.
Give up plug-ins and use HTML5 and Javascript. Brought to you by the people who said we should use CSS instead of tables but then couldn't implement trivial grid layouts, or maybe by the guys who said we should use CSS instead of graphics but then complained that everyone's buttons looked like Bootstrap.
Yeah, a user can disable the check for certain sites, but when you have hundreds of such repositories...you get the picture.
I always found it more convenient to open PDFs in stand-alone Reader instead. Sure, it takes one mouse click more, but on the other hand the browser remains usable while the Reader loads and you get full-featured Reader instead of the gimped plugin.
As for the Adobe Reader, I can't imagine why anyone would even want to have that installed...?
Chrome never made a project to parse and present all pdf, just internalized PDF reader (truth be told, Mozilla nabbed the man that built pdf.js).
once, in the navbar, and whitelist the business-required site.
If they manage to click through everything correctly and whitelist the site, they're good to go, but I suspect many of my users are going to get at least part of it wrong the first time through.
And of course, the noise about Java security is already breaking things -- for example, a few days ago I got an email from a teacher whose school paid me a $600 for a Java-applet based site subscription... at the same time as their IT department completely uninstalled Java from their school computers.
So now I either have to convince their IT department directly to re-install Java, or refund their money; whoops.
OTOH hopefully this will convince netflex etc to migrate away from reliance on silverlight and we can have something that works on Linux without a load of wine hacks.
I'm pretty sure I can't handle MIDI and audio input, do pitch detection, show animations synched with generated audio, etc. in JavaScript on IE6 (and only parts of that are possible in any browser) -- but I can do it with a Java applet.
Or, I could; my site is obviously starting to suffer from the reliance on Java, and every few days the news seems to get worse.
I actually deal a lot more with IE6/7 in my main job (users in the NHS) than for the music theory site, but to my main point above -- there are plenty of audio features that are just now starting to be possible in Chrome (no other browser, yet); that's simply not useful in the context of real, normal-people users.