By now, we all know the situation with Adobe Flash. It’s slow, it’s memory-hungry, and it drains your device’s battery like crazy. Plus, it’s really old. So you’d think lots of websites and content distributors would’ve switched away from it a while ago. Well, that’s not the case, as many sites still depend on the plugin to load their content properly for viewing. One browser in question, however, has the software built-in so there’s no need for another third-party software installation, and that browser is Google Chrome. So feel free to uninstall Adobe Flash from your computer and continue using Chrome because you won’t even notice it.
Oh wait, scratch that…
New reports have surfaced stating that Google has a plan to ultimately kill Adobe Flash inside Chrome in favor of HTML5, a much better alternative to Flash. While the action hasn’t been finalized just yet, in Q4 of 2016 is when you can expect the change to take over.
As 9to5Google notes, Flash will still be present in the Google-built browser, it just won’t be visible all the time.
Flash Player will still be installed as part of Chrome, but it will be invisible to websites. Google has built-in measures to address sites that direct users to install Flash from Adobe. When users click on an “Install Flash” link, Chrome will show the prompt to whitelist Flash on that site.
To avoid over-prompting users, the top 10 sites on the Internet using Flash — as determined through internal metrics — will be whitelisted by default:
YouTube.com, Facebook.com, Yahoo.com, VK.com, Live.com, Yandex.ru, OK.ru, Twitch.tv, Amazon.com, and Mail.ru.
After a year, this whitelist will no longer be active, which gives sites such as Facebook and YouTube to switch their content over to HTML5-dependable.
Of course, Flash won’t entirely be unavailable. In Chrome’s settings, you’ll be able to enable the plugin so it runs all the time or at certain times when it’s necessary. This’ll be specifically welcomed by enterprise users who need their content always able to load whenever they need it to.
It’s really quite interesting that now is the time Google is just starting to kill off Flash. As I previously stated, Flash is really old. In fact, it’s like 15 years old. That’s pretty old for a software that so prone to bugs, it’s probably one of the leading malware-catching programs on the planet. So you’d think Flash would die a while ago. Well, that’s obviously not the case, however we are approaching that glorious day when we say goodbye (and good riddance) to the plugin once and for all. Let’s just hope that time isn’t too far away.
Source: 9to5Google
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