Flashblock

» see flashblock.mozdev.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Flashblock did one thing. Wherever a page tried to load Flash, it put a small gray rectangle with a play button on it instead, and nothing downloaded or started until you clicked that button. If a site was one you trusted, you whitelisted it and it behaved normally forever after. Philip Chee released the first version on 28 January 2004 and kept it going for the next eleven years, shipping a parallel line of builds for everything in the Mozilla family that was not Firefox: SeaMonkey, the old Mozilla Suite, Netscape Navigator 9, Flock.

Why that mattered takes some reconstructing now. Flash was how the web did motion, and so it was also how the web did the things you did not want: the full-screen ad that unfolded over the article, the banner with sound, the intro animation standing between you and the site. InformationWeek was calling Flashblock one of the most popular Firefox extensions by 2006. Lifehacker was still telling people to install it in 2009. On addons.mozilla.org in January 2016 it had 593,876 users and 1,196 reviews averaging four stars.

By the middle of 2017 that number was 424,955 and still dropping. A hundred and seventy thousand people had taken it off in eighteen months, the standard curve for a tool whose job somebody else has quietly started doing.

~ the record ~

~ where Flash was the destination ~

This extension was built by and for people who experienced Flash as something arriving uninvited. That framing does not quite survive a trip to a Turkish internet cafe in 2004, where the machine next to you was running a Flash game because a Flash game was what you came in for. Flash was not an intrusion in that room, it was the destination, and a tool that made it ask permission first was simply in the way.

At home the arithmetic ran the other way and Flashblock's logic held. Dial-up was still what I had in 2004, broadband two years off, and a page that quietly pulled down a few hundred kilobytes of animation nobody had asked for was spending something countable. The dial-up case for blocking Flash was about the bill, not about taste.

~ click to activate, except for Flash ~

Mozilla liked the idea enough to try shipping it. In January 2013 it announced that Firefox would make all plugins click-to-play by default, and the single exception was going to be the current version of Flash, on the grounds that Flash was everywhere and breaking it would confuse people. By the time Firefox 26 reached users on 10 December 2013 the feature had been narrowed further still, down to Java alone.

So for years the browser agreed with Flashblock in principle and carved out the one plugin Flashblock existed to stop. The extension stayed necessary because the fix kept making an exception for the problem. Chrome and Firefox both got there eventually, around 2016 and 2017, by which point Adobe had already announced that Flash was finished.

~ the news page stopped first ~

flashblock.mozdev.org kept a "What's New" column down the side listing every release. Read it from the bottom and you get eleven years of maintenance: 2008 for Firefox 1.5 through 3.1, 2010 for Netscape 9 and Flock, 2011, 2012. The last entry on that column is dated 23 March 2013, announcing 1.5.17 for Firefox 4 through 22 and 1.3.20 for SeaMonkey.

Releases did not actually stop there. The AMO listing shows version 1.5.20 going out on 6 December 2015, thirty-two months after the project's own front page had stopped mentioning that anything was happening. Firefox 57 shipped on 14 November 2017 and stopped loading XUL add-ons, which took Flashblock off every machine that had it. The page outlasted the extension by a long way, serving right up to 27 June 2020, then switching to a redirect on 28 July when mozdev.org wound down after twenty years. The hostname has no DNS record left.

~ outlived by Flash ~

Adobe ended Flash Player on 31 December 2020. Flashblock's home had gone dark in July of that year, so the extension built to stand between you and Flash lost its address five months before Flash was deleted from the web entirely.

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