Firefox 52 bans plug-ins, supports 'game changer' standard

From InfoWorld: Mozilla today updated Firefox to version 52, which warns users when they put passwords into non-encrypted websites, bars all plug-ins other than Adobe’s Flash Player and adds support for an under-consideration technology standard that claims to run web apps at nearly the same speed as native code.

Firefox 52 also patched 28 security vulnerabilities, a half dozen of them tagged with the “Critical” label. On another security front, the browser now pops up a warning message when users start to type in a password into a page not secured—and encrypted—with HTTPS.

The just-instituted plug-in prohibition applied to NPAPI plug-ins, (Netscape Plug-in Application Programming Interface) a format from the 1990s and Netscape, the browser Microsoft buried in its antitrust-triggering battle over the browser market. NPAPI has now been banned from most browsers; Apple’s Safari is the largest exception.

But Mozilla trumpeted Firefox 52’s support for WebAssembly the loudest.

In a pair of posts—one to a company blog, another to Medium.com, Mozilla executives touted Firefox as the first to support WebAssembly; that wasn’t much of a surprise, since the potential standard stemmed from a Mozilla research project.

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