Google will start blocking Flash content in Chrome by the end of the year
Google will start blocking Flash content in Chrome by the end of the year
It’s been foretold countless times – Flash’s demise is imminent. Google has now announced its intention to begin blocking the majority of Flash content with Chrome, a move that might just be the final nail in Flash’s coffin. The change will take effect toward the end of the year, and comes not long after Google detailed plans to block Flash ads in Chrome last year.
If Google has its way, nearly every website will have Flash content blocked by default. However, this wouldn’t be an impermeable blockade, and users could still enable Flash content on a site-by-site basis, but they would have to do this manually. Chrome would display a prompt to enable Flash, and if users chose to give the greenlight, Chrome would run Flash on that site in the future.
But when the change takes effect, certain sites will still be exempted for a further one year. These are the top 10 domains using Flash, and include popular websites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and even Amazon. However, once the one-year exemption expires, they will also have Flash blocked by default like other sites.
All in all, this is a security move that could protect users against unwanted and possibly malicious content. Flash has been a major source of critical vulnerabilities in recent years (see here, here, and here), and even Adobe doesn’t think that you should continue to use Flash. This could also help provide further impetus for the switch to HTML5 on the part of web developers, so that they don’t end up losing their site audiences.
Furthermore, Chrome will be set to prefer HTML5 over Flash. This means that if a website has a backup HTML5 player, Chrome users will see that, instead of the prompt to enable Flash.
And given that Adobe is also encouraging developers to stop producing Flash-based content and use HTML5, Flash may soon go the way of the dodo in other browsers as well.
Source: Chromium (1), (2) via The Verge