Firefox 26 Beta arrives: Click to Play Plugins Enabled by Default

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The Beta version of Mozilla's flagship browser which is now on version 26 is out. The most interesting addition in Firefox 26 Beta is the new 'Click to Play' feature. This feature will disable all plugins in Firefox except the recent version of flash player. Users will be able to choose which plugin to play by clicking on it. This will significantly reduce the number of hangs, crashes and security incidents and also improve Firefox performance and stability. At present Firefox automatically loads all plugins requested by a website. But from now on (in the beta version) whenever a site tries to use a plugin, the user will be able to choose whether to enable the plugin on that site. Firefox has also improved page load times since it will no longer decode images that aren't visible. There have been a couple of other changes too in Firefox 26 Beta. For the full list of changes, here are the release notes.


  • NEW: All plug-ins, with the exception of recent Flash plug-ins, are defaulted to ‘click to play’.
  • NEW: Password manager now supports script-generated password fields.
  • NEW: Updates can now be performed by Windows users without write permissions to Firefox install directory (requires Mozilla Maintenance Service).
  • NEW: Support for H.264 on Linux if the appropriate gstreamer plug-ins are installed.
  • CHANGED: Support for MP3 decoding on Windows XP, completing MP3 support across Windows OS versions.
  • CHANGED: CSP implementation now supports multiple policies, including the case of both an enforced and Report-Only policy, per the spec.
  • DEVELOPER: Social API now supports Social Bookmarking for multiple providers through its SocialMarks functionality (see MDN docs).
  • DEVELOPER: There is no longer a prompt when websites use appcache.
  • DEVELOPER: Support for the CSS image orientation property.
  • DEVELOPER: New App Manager allows you to deploy and debug HTML5 webapps on Firefox OS phones and the Firefox OS Simulator.
  • DEVELOPER: IndexedDB can now be used as a “optimistic” storage area so it doesn’t require any prompts and data is stored in a pool with LRU eviction policy, in short temporary storage.
  • FIXED: When displaying a standalone image, Firefox matches the EXIF orientation information contained within the JPEG image (298619).
  • FIXED: Improved page load times due to no longer decoding images that aren’t visible (847223).
  • FIXED: AudioToolbox MP3 backend for OSX (914479).

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