It is no secret that Flash has pretty much lost its darling status as a tool for web developers. Heralded back in the day as being a means of bringing new multimedia content onto the web, the protocol has in recent years fallen to the wayside due to a bunch of security issues, and the fact that HTML5 has pretty much superseded it.
It looks like Flash may have been dealt another blow because as noted by the folks at Lifehacker, the latest Chrome update will pretty much disable Flash in the browser automatically and by default. The latest version of Chrome will bring it up to version 55 and is rolling out for macOS and Windows users.
While the update will now automatically disable Flash content, it doesn’t mean that Flash is no longer supported. Basically if you want to view Flash content or if there are websites that still rely on the platform, you will need to enable support manually. However given that many websites have since switched to HTML5, such as YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook, there’s a good chance you might not run into any compatibility or usability issues.
Like we said the update is rolling out now so if you can’t wait, go to your Google Chrome Settings, About, and it should start to pull the update manually if it hasn’t done so already.