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.
