I am a hipster Flash hater. I hated Flash before Steve Jobs told it was bad. I hate Flash before Adobe said there would be no Flash 7 for Linux. I don't have Flash on my machine. I even coined "fc;dw".

I have been muling over an idea for far too long, and an enlightning conversation with fellow Mozillians made me do it Tuesday night.

I therefor introduce a proof of concept Firefox add-on: No Flash.

The problem: there are a lot of pages around the web that embed video from big name video website, like Youtube and Vimeo. These pages might use, more often than not, the Flash embedding, either because they predate HTML5, or they use a plugin for their CMS (Wordpress) that only does that. Getting these fixed will be a pointless effort. On a positive note, it appears that Google own blogspot modified the embedding of the Youtube content they serve already.

So let's fix this on the client side.

Currently the addon will look for embedded Flash Youtube and Vimeo players and replace them in the document by the more modern iframe embedding. This has the good taste of using the vendor detection for the actual player.

Note that this is, in some way, similar to what Safari on iOS does, at least with Youtube, where they replace the Flash player with the system built-in one.

Before:

No Flash Before

Notice the Flash placeholders - I don't have Flash.

After:

No Flash After

Note the poster images.

Feel free to checkout the source code

Or file issues