Flash is dead. Very dead. It lingers, however, mainly in the form of web games. Right now (at least in Chrome) you can give your favourite Flash game sites permission to run the plugin. That will change next month with Chrome 69, when constant “explicit permission” will be required.
Chrome 69, slated for release sometime in September, will enforce a stricter policy on authorising Flash content, to the point where the annoyance of constantly giving it permission might be enough for dedicated users to abandon it forever:
Summary Sites using Flash will require explicit permission to run, every time the user restarts the browser.
Rationale Require affirmative user choice to run Flash Player content, without that choice persisting across multiple sessions.
It’s another small step towards banishing Flash entirely. But don’t fret! If for some reason you depend on Flash day-to-day, Google doesn’t plan to remove the plugin until Chrome 87-ish, scheduled for December 2020 (a date Mozilla is also adhering to for Firefox).
Flash roadmap [Chromium, via gHacks]
I hate this and I hate Google for making this change. There are so many websites that will never be updated to use HTML. One is the Blood Typing Game (which The Nobel Prize actually removed today but that isn’t the point). We shouldn’t be killing Flash. Let people who want to use it, use it. Transitioning off of Flash is cool but it removing it completely means much of the web will be gone.
I use Chrome on my phone and laptop and I recommend it to most people. I might just switch to another browser. Maybe Firefox or a fork if Chromium. I’ll definitely miss Google Translate, Google Sync, the extensions and not having popups on Google sites.
But…you understand the reasoning behind killing flash right? It’s a security hole ridden application, but pretty much no one develops in anymore and have migrated to HTML5 alojng with other technologies including various javascript engines which gives similar/better results.
Yeah. Of course I understand why. Everyone knows why at this point. Well, everyone who would be reading something on Lifehacker
As much as I hate flash myself, working as a tech in a school this is a nightmare for me. All the sites the teachers use include flash. More pop-ups asking for permissions just means more call outs for me.
I’m sure there’ll be an enterprise policy you can push to disable this.
Knowing Google, there won’t be
You seem to be mistaken. Can be pushed via GPO -> https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1993839-chrome-allow-a-specific-flash-policy-exception
Yep! It’s so annoying. I’m glad we can disable it using the flag:
chrome://flags/#enable-ephemeral-flash-permission
but unfortunately they are getting a id of that flag and the flags to get the pretty Chrome back with the next release. It’s sad. It’d not like we can even disable updates for Chrome. By the way, you can disable Chrome from hiding http/s and www in the flags.