In a bid to get more developers to adopt HTML5, Google has announced
plans to slowly phase out support for Adobe Flash Player in Chrome. The
company looks to implement this change by the fourth quarter, after
which Flash will come bundled with Chrome but its presence will not be
advertised by default.
It will instead promote HTML5 which
provides faster load times and consumes less power. So if any website
offers an HTML5 experience, it will be made as the default experience.
As many sites still use Flash, Google is not completely blocking it, but
is nonetheless discouraging it. If a site absolutely cannot work
without Flash Player, then Google will prompt its users to run the
plug-in for that domain only.
Google states that Chrome will also
keep a track of the domains that the user manually opted for Flash, and
open it automatically in subsequent visits. Furthermore, Google has
named the ten most used websites that run Flash, and has white-listed
them to avoid over-prompting. The names of some of the white-list
websites are YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Yandex.ru, Live.com,
Mail.ru, OK.ru, VK.com and Twitch.tv. These websites will have Flash
Player running without any hiccups. However this white-list expires in
one year, and by the end of 2017, these websites are expected to make
the switch to HTML5.
Google is also discouraging the download of
Flash Player, by trapping links that redirect to the download page. Some
sites like Pandora ask the user to download Flash Player by redirecting
them to Adobe's installation page. Once the user clicks on the download
link, Chrome will intercept the request, cancel the navigation, and
instead present an 'Allow Flash Player' yellow infobar on top. This is
merely done in an attempt to get the user to rethink before using Flash.
For
Enterprise users, Chrome will enable a setting that gives the option to
"Always run Flash content", for all intranet sites that may use Flash.
Even though Google is doing all it takes to get rid of Flash, there are
quite a few creative, interactive and gaming sites that use Flash
heavily and changing them to HTML 5 now, would be a deep tedious task.
Chrome may run Flash on click-to-play basis to discourage its use, but
the Web isn't getting rid of Flash just yet.
Microsoft to Fully Remove Adobe Flash From Windows 10 to Keep Customers Secure5 May 2021
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