Chrome Will Block Flash Content Starting Next Month

Google has hammered another nail in Adobe Flash’s proverbial coffin. In a blog post today the company sang praises of Flash and acknowledged the “pivotal role” it has played in the adoption of gaming, video, and animation on the internet. It pointed out that most websites are now using HTML5 to provide better security, faster page load times, and reduced power consumption, which is why Google Chrome is going to de-emphasize Flash in favor of HTML5.

More than 90 percent of Flash content on the web loads behind the scene to support things like page analytics. It’s this kind of Flash that slows down page load times and may cause other issues. Google has decided that starting with Chrome 53 it will start blocking this kind of Flash by default from next month.

This change is similar to the one Google made in September last year in which some Flash content became click-to-play with Chrome 42. Now that publishers are switching over to HTML5 it makes sense to further confine Flash and that’s precisely what Google is doing with the next version of Chrome.

Google has also announced that starting this December, Chrome 55 is going to make HTML5 the default experience except for websites that only support Flash. It will prompt users to enable Flash for those websites when they first visit them. That’s the only change users will notice aside from a more power efficient and safer browsing experience.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: adobe flash, Google, google chrome