Google’s Chrome browser is the most popular in the world, and with that comes a lot of influence and probably responsibility. Google has plans to use that responsibility wisely, to kill off Adobe Flash by the end of the year by prioritising HTML5 content where possible.
The plan isn’t yet finalised, unsurprisingly, but as reported by VentureBeat Google is working on a plan to start the move in Q4 2016. For sites that require Adobe Flash, the browser will show users a prompt to manually enable the Flash plugin, and that preference will be remembered in future to prevent too many alerts annoying users.
Adobe’s Flash plugin will still be installed as part of the Chrome setup, but it won’t be visible to websites — in other words, it will appear to websites that users do not have Flash installed. Google will also intercept links to install the plugin, allowing users to whitelist those sites for Flash if they must.
In the interim, Google will whitelist ten most popular Flash sites by default, but that whitelist will expire in a year’s time, with the goal of forcing those sites to be rid of Flash completely and to adopt the more open, secure and safe standards offered by HTML5. The Top 10 sites include YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, VK.com, Live.com, Twitch.TV, Amazon.com and a number of Russian language sites.
As you can see, Chrome’s default option will be to allow users to allow sites to ask to run Flash. For those who absolutely must run Flash, and who don’t want constant prompts, the option will remain to always run Flash, but most users won’t use this, and so the godawful plugin will be allowed to die a natural death.
We won’t miss it.
I was a Flash programmer for years. It’s the most amazing technology ever developed in the history of the web. Unfortunately, it’s easily the most abused technology ever too. It should never have been used for ads, or intros, or 99% of the other things that it was used for. You could write very fast apps that didn’t tax your CPU or battery if you took a little care but unfortunately what it will be remembered for is obnoxious ads where the developers pushed the framerates to 100fps just because they could. In most areas – like online games –… Read more »
Sadly, you’re right. The problem with flash was that it enabled people to make garbage, and that garbage became profitable. Many of the tools also encouraged lazy coding or development practices… which led to Flash gaining its resource hog reputation. I won’t miss Flash at all.
I didn’t mind or notice it being a hog, but constant security updates were annoying.