Apple, Inc.’s latest web browser Safari 10, which will ship later this year with macOS Sierra, will disable common plug-ins and preference HTML 5 content in an effort to improve the web browsing experience.

The new browser will disable Adobe Flash, Java, Silverlight, and even Apple’s QuickTime by default.

Users who reach a page that requires one of these plugins will be given the option of enabling them for that website only; the browser will not offer the ability for users to have them switched on for all websites they visit.

Apple developer Ricky Mondello explained on the WebKit blog how a user visiting a site that requires Flash will work:

Most websites that detect that Flash isn’t available, but don’t have an HTML5 fallback, display a “Flash isn’t installed” message with a link to download Flash from Adobe. If a user clicks on one of those links, Safari will inform them that the plug-in is already installed and offer to activate it just one time or every time the website is visited. The default option is to activate it only once. We have similar handling for the other common plug-ins.

When a website directly embeds a visible plug-in object, Safari instead presents a placeholder element with a “Click to use” button. When that’s clicked, Safari offers the user the options of activating the plug-in just one time or every time the user visits that website. Here too, the default option is to activate the plug-in only once.

Safari 10 will also include a menu command to reload a page when a plugin is activated, making the process simple for users.

Warning

Apple is warning website owners that this change will affect how users interact with their sites, and recommends that they implement features using technologies built into the web platform, such as using HTML5 <audio>, <video>, the Audio Context API, and Media Source Extensions “to implement robust, secure, customized media players.”

The move by Apple to cripple Flash, in particular, is part of a growing trend against the Adobe designed platform that has seen Google, Inc. announce that its Chrome browser will also take a similar path, along with Microsoft’s Edge browser only permitting Flash to run if it’s a core element of a page.

Along with being recognized as a source of system degradation, through increased battery usage and decreased system performance, Flash has also long been known to present a massive security risk given it is frequently exploited.

Efforts to remove support for Flash should be welcomed, and although there is clearly a cost to website owners who may currently be using Flash in their offerings in terms of them needing to change to HTML 5, the security of the internet and its users must come first.

photo credit: iMacs at the office via photopin (license)