Firefox 30: These plugins are temporarily whitelisted

Mozilla and Google are moving towards a plugin-free web experience. Google announced last year that it will block all classic plugins -- s0 called NPAPI plugins -- from the Chrome browser in 2014.

While Google's move is rather radical, considering that the browser wont support plugins at all anymore when the company implements the change, Mozilla's approach is slightly different even though it may have the same result at a later point in time.

The organization will set all Firefox browser plugins except those on a whitelist that it maintains to click to play. This means that plugins won't start automatically anymore if they are not the on the whitelist, but that users won't lose any functionality as they can still enable the plugin on a site that requests it.

Mozilla announced the creation of a whitelist back in March 2014. It added Adobe Flash to that whitelist automatically and asked plugin developers to submit plugins for whitelist inclusion.

Plugins had to adhere to the Firefox Plugin Whitelist Policy if they wanted to be included on the whitelist. One of the requirements was a credible plan to move away from NPAPI.

Accepted plugins are added to the whitelist so that they are still activated by default in Firefox for the next four releases cycles.All other plugins are set to click to play.

Companies can apply for a second inclusion on the whitelist after the first period.

Mozilla reserves the right however to exclude any plugin, even those it accepted beforehand, from the whitelist at any time. This can happen for instance when plugins cause critical security issues in the browser.

The whitelisted plugins

All whitelisted plugins have been listed now on Bugzilla. It is still possible that additional plugins will get added in the future, but it is very likely that Firefox 30 will ship with this whitelist.

• bug 979849 - Unity
• bug 980133 - Cisco Jabber SDK
• bug 980772 - McAfee Security Scanner
• bug 981403 - Cisco VGConnect for directv.com
• bug 981905 - Cisco Jabber Guest
• bug 982045 - Estonian ID card
• bug 984441 - coupons.com
• bug 987056 - Nexus Personal BankID
• bug 988119 - gradecam
• bug 988781 - Smart Card Plugin
• bug 989096 - Cisco WebEx
• bug 990067 - Skype
• bug 990068 - Facebook video calling
• bug 990069 - MS Office Lync plugin
• bug 990286 - VidyoWeb plugin
• Adobe Flash

Update May 8:

• F5 Networks SSLVPN
• McAfee SiteAdvisor Enterprise
• McAfee Virtual Technician
• Verimatrix ViewRightsWeb

Every other browser plugin will be set to click to play by default when Firefox 30 is released.

Note: You can set any plugin to click to play in Firefox, and change the state of plugins at any time as well. While it is too early to tell, it seems likely that you can set plugins to always activate manually in Firefox.

One interesting bit that you can take away from the whitelisted plugin listing is that it is very likely that all of them will be made available in a different form in the future (with the exception of Flash).

Unity for instance is working on a WebGL version of the engine in cooperation with Mozilla. Mozilla is also working on Shumway, a Flash replacement.