The death of Flash is imminent; we’ve known that for a few years. A security threat and a battery hob, Flash is replaced with other tools. Even Adobe has had it with Flash. But Google will drive another nail in Flash’s coffin by disabling it in Chrome by the end of the year.
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According to its documentation, Google wants to make HTML5 default in Chrome, instead of Flash. The company will not remove the plugin from Chrome, just yet, but it looks like that’s the direction it’s heading.
Chrome will display the HTML5 experience on all sites where it’s available. Flash will still be a default option for top 10 sites that depend on it, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, Amazon, and others. These sites will be whitelisted for a year, “to reduce the initial user impact, and avoid over-prompting.”
Furthermore, those sites that still display content in Flash will be accessible to the user. Chrome will display a prompt on top of the site who still delivers Flash content, informing the user that Flash is required and offering the option to enable the plugin. Should the user allow Flash to run inside Chrome, the browser will remember the preference and refresh the page with Flash enabled.
A mockup showing Google’s one such prompt is seen above, with more available in Google’s presentation (at this link).
Meanwhile, if you still use Flash in your browser, make sure you update to the latest version, as Adobe just recently patched a Flash zero-day exploit.
