It is no secret that Adobe’s Flash is no longer the web darling that it once used to be. In fact the recent discovery of Flash zero-day vulnerabilities has led to browsers such as Firefox blocking all Flash content, and seeing major websites such as Twitch making the jump to HTML5, and come 1st of September, Google will be attempting to phase Flash out as well.
The company has recently announced that moving forward, their Chrome browser will automatically freeze Flash files that are not important. This means that if you wish to see said files, you will have to click on them to manually enable them, but otherwise they will be frozen by default.
If this sounds familiar, it is because earlier this year, Google announced that they would auto-pause nonessential Flash content on websites viewed in its Chrome browser, so the 1st of September is actually when this new ruling will go into effect. According to Google, “In June, we announced that Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default to improve performance for users. This change is scheduled to start rolling out on September 1, 2015.”
Google also notes that for its advertisers, Flash ads are automatically converted to HTML5 so they don’t have to worry, although they note that it is possible that some older content won’t be able to convert and they are asking advertisers to double check the ads in their accounts.