Do you hear that? It’s the last breaths of Adobe Flash, which could finally be overtaken by Mozilla’s release of Firefox 85 on Tuesday.
Until now, Firefox was the last of the old guard to support Flash. Apple first dissided the software in 2010 by banning iPhones and then again in 2020 by refusing to support it with Safari 14, and Google and Microsoft ditched it earlier this year with the releases of Chrome version 88 and Edge 88, respectively. was an early pioneer for gaming, video and animation on the Internet, Adobe had previously announced a long-term strategy to discontinue updates to and distribution of Flash Player, encouraging creators to migrate dependent content to the more modern open formats.
In addition to some notable omissions, Firefox 85 has also added some interesting new features, including network partitioning that works to protect users from super cookie tracking by splitting browser cache by website.
Over the years, trackers have been found that store user IDs as super cookies in increasingly obscure areas of the browser, including in Flash storage, ETags, and HSTS flags, ”Mozilla wrote in a blog post. “The changes we are making to Firefox 85 significantly reduce the effectiveness of cache-based super cookies by preventing a tracker from using them on websites.”
Other big additions include changes to the way bookmarked pages are saved in the browser and an option to delete all saved credentials by clicking a single button, which could make life easier users sharing a computer or have to clear their browser for privacy reasons.
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