Adobe’s Flash Player will be switched off by default at the end of this year, meaning Chrome users will need to actively turn it on for all but a handful of top websites.
The slow and inexorable slide to a world without Flash continues, with Google revealing plans to phase out support for Adobe’s Flash Player in its Chrome browser for all but a handful of websites. And the company expects the changes to roll out by the fourth quarter of 2016.
While it says Flash might have “historically” been a good way to present rich media online, Google is now much more partial to HTML5, thanks to faster load times and lower power use.
As a result, Flash will still come bundled with Chrome, but “its presence will not be advertised by default.” Where the Flash Player is the only option for viewing content on a site, users will need to actively switch it on for individual sites. Enterprise Chrome users will also have the option of switching Flash off altogether.
Google will maintain support in the short-term for the top 10 domains using the player, including YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitch and Amazon. But this “whitelist” is set to be periodically reviewed, with sites removed if they no longer warrant an exception, and the exemption list will expire after a year.
Source: Google to block Flash on Chrome, only 10 websites exempt – CNET
