In an attempt to get more developers to adopt HTML5 for their websites and to prevent regular update prompts from Adobe, Google has now announced its plans to slowly phase out support for Adobe Flash Player in Chrome. This is mainly due to security concerns of the flash player which has been in news recently, especially after Adobe engineers performed a zero day vulnerability test. Google looks forward to implement this change by the fourth quarter of the current year, after which Flash will come bundled with Chrome but its presence will not be advertised by the company as a default.
Google will instead promote HTML5 which not only provides faster load times and consumes less power but is also much more secure. So if any website, courtesy its developers, offer an HTML5 experience, it will be made as the default experience. In other cases, where HTML5 experience isn’t available, flash will continue to do its job. This is precisely the reason why Google is not completely blocking it, but is nonetheless discouraging it. If a site just cannot work without Flash Player, then Google will prompt its Chrome users to run the plug-in just for that domain.
Google also states that Chrome will be optimized to keep a track of the domains that the user manually opted for Flash, and thereby open it automatically in subsequent visits. Furthermore, Google has even researched and named the ten most used websites that run Flash, and has therefore white-listed them to avoid over-prompting and making users irritable. Some of the aforementioned white-list websites are YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Yandex.ru, Live.com, Mail.ru, OK.ru, VK.com and Twitch.tv. These websites will have Flash Player running without any hiccups. However this white-list expires in a year’s time, and by the end of 2017, these websites are also expected to switch over to HTML5.
