Say Goodbye to Flash Under Firefox 27

Here’s a quick tip.

If you’re using the nightly release of Firefox then you’ll be up to Firefox 27 but you may not have realised that a new feature has slipped into the build. Mozilla has managed to build something called Shumway that renders SWF files in HTML5 removing the need for Flash to be installed on the system. The main goals with this particular project is to create something that will be effective and efficient which would be traits arguably absent from Flash on a general basis.

Anyway, if you’re keen to have a play this is how to turn it out:

1. Go to about:config
2. Click I’ll be careful, I promise if it appears,
3. Search for shumway.disabled and change it to false by double click on it
4. Hit Alt + T on the keyboard and select Add-ons,
5. Click on Plugins on the left,
6. Locate Shockwave Flash and set it to Never Activate.

I have had a quick dabble with it and tabs are very snappy to load with Shumway enabled and Flash disabled but I will continue to observe stability and performance in these early stages.