Safari 10 Will Disable Flash and Other Legacy Plug-Ins by Default

Announced this morning on WebKit.org, the new version of Safari shipping with macOS Sierra this Fall is going to disable legacy plug-ins such as Flash, Java, Silverlight, and QuickTime by default.

From the WebKit blog post:

The WebKit project in particular emphasizes security, performance, and battery life when evaluating and implementing web standards. These standards now include most of the functionality needed to support rich media and interactive experiences that used to require legacy plug-ins like Adobe Flash. When Safari 10 ships this fall, by default, Safari will behave as though common legacy plug-ins on users’ Macs are not installed.

The plug-ins may still exist on your system, but Safari 10 will tell websites that you navigate to that they do not. For most websites that offer HTML5 substitutes for Flash and other plug-ins, this change will cause them to send you their HTML5 versions at all times. For websites that do not have an alternative to the legacy plug-ins, Safari will prompt you asking if you’d like to enable the necessary plug-in for that site, with options to do so only once, or every time the site is visited.

The prompt in Safari 10 asking if you’d like to enable a legacy plug-in for a site that requires it

There will be a new command in Safari’s View menu, as well as in the contextual menu from the reload button, to reload webpages with all installed plug-ins activated. If you activate plug-ins for a website, Safari will keep them activated for that site until the plug-ins have not been used on the site for one month’s time, after which you’ll need to reactivate them if you end up needing to use them again.