Google announced this morning that Chrome 53 will begin to ‘de-emphasize’ the use of Flash on the web in favour of the newer, faster, more secure and all around better performing HTML5 standards.
This de-emphasis of Flash will take several forms, for flash used in things like page analytics, that has no direct benefit to the users viewing experience, will be blocked automatically by Chrome as of this September. Website using flash based systems should have known this was coming and switched to a more modern system. This should reduce page load times and improve the overall web experience, and your data/battery life.
Following this, in December Chrome 55 will make HTML5 the default for all sites except those who only support flash. For those sites users will be prompted to enable Flash for those sites the first time you visit.
Flash has had its day, it’s older, slower and more insecure that it’s modern day equivalents, and I for one am happy to see any pressure put on websites who are still relying on this outdated standard.
From this news, one could extrapolate that Google will have migrated all of their analytics off Flash by September and their site by December, so Google should enter 2017 Flash-free. I look forward to the day I can reminisce about how we USED to use flash.
Are you happy to see flash departing the open web? Let us know below.
Hmmmm… I just had to install flash today. Hadn’t been using it, but I wanted to use Google music in a web browser. Apparently they still need it 🙁
There’s a html5 version. I thought it was default by now. You can go into settings and turn it on.
Can hardly wait. Flash is awful, and barely supported on Linux.
is this for desktop too ?
I think it’s only desktop. Chrome on Android doesn’t support flash.