Click to Play Plug-In Security Enhancement Coming to Firefox 14

Firefox web browsing security is pretty good and the current version, 12, is better than ever, but it can always be improved. One such improvement coming to a future version of Firefox, version 14, will be a feature called Click to Play. It basically creates a default deny setting for plug-in installs, such as Flash or Adobe Reader, which should help to improve security, as this type of plug-in install is used for malware vectors.

The Mozilla Firefox development team were inspired to add the feature from the presence of similar third party plug-ins such as NoScript and Flashblock, which stop various JAVA and Flash embedded files from loading or running automatically. The idea is similar to User Account Control (UAC) in Windows Vista and Windows 7. This will help to reduce those nasty drive-by download exploits that infect a computer without any user intervention. When Firefox 14 is ready, it will be a must-have upgrade for this security improvement alone. It can’t come soon enough. To be honest, it’s surprising that this wasn’t implemented a long time ago, since it’s easy to do and Firefox is marketed on its good security, among other features.