It has been a slow and agonising death for Adobe’s Flash plugin on the web. Riddled with issues including some major security flaws in the past, it has rapidly lost favour with websites, web browsers and technology vendors. Now Google has unveiled a detailed plan on how it will be phasing out Flash on its popular Chrome browser.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
HTML5 has become the preferred technology for displaying multimedia content on websites and Google is all in favour of this:
“While Flash historically has been critical for rich media on the web, today in many cases HTML5 provides a more integrated media experience with faster load times and lower power consumption. This change reflects the maturity of HTML5 and its ability to deliver an excellent user experience.”
Google has already started suspending Flash ads being displayed through its browser and now it plans to make Chrome block all Flash content by default on nearly every website. According to the current plan, 10 websites will be whitelisted so they can still display Flash content: YouTube, Facebook and Twitch.tv are some of the sites on the list. These websites still depend on Flash for some of its content and Google is giving them one year to transition off this technology before it drops the whitelist completely.
“Chrome will also be adding policy controls so that enterprises will be able to select the appropriate experience for their users, which will include the ability to completely disable the feature,” Google said on the Chromium developer forum.
Google aims to bring in this change by the end of the year.
[Via Chromium developer forum]
Comments
3 responses to “Google Chrome To Block Flash By Default”
I hope users get to control that whitelist. Additionally, why do those websites get an extra year to transition, while everyone else in the world is expected to do it by the end of the year? Sure, they’re big websites, but they also have huge engineering budgets and staff, it would be just as much work for smaller firms to transition as these guys.
I read about this somewhere else and it said you can manage your own whitelist. Not sure why that was not included here.
I like Flash youtube better, you can get a video URL in one right click then one left click. The HTML5 player makes you either click a bunch more times or use the keyboard, too annoying.
Actually, the progress bar for long videos is better on the Flash player too, with the hover-zoom thing instead of that weird drag-zoom thing that I can never get to work well.
Does anyone know if microsoft has any plans for Flash ?