Google’s crusade against Flash will take a huge step later this year
Put another nail in the coffin for Flash. It’s no secret by now that Google has a furious vengeance against Flash and wishes to see its use ended at some point in the future. While they obviously have no control over the entirety of the web, they will use their influence as a top web company and maintainer of the second most widely used browser on the web to help see that it dies.
Google has detailed a plan to disable the Flash plugin in Google Chrome by the end of this year. The browser will use flags to check and see if a site has HTML5, and will show the user that experience over a Flash-driven variant when possible. If a site does primarily use Flash, Google will prompt the user to enable Flash for that site.
Google will make this transition a bit easy by allowing the top 10 websites which use Flash to continue to use the plugin even while it’s disabled. Here’s that list:
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YouTube.com
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Facebook.com
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Yahoo.com
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VK.com
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Live.com
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Yandex.ru
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OK.ru
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Twitch.tv
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Amazon.com
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Mail.ru
That said, Google will remove sites from the whitelist when they fully implement HTML5-based frameworks, and Google will even remove this whitelist by the end of 2017 no matter who has yet to transition.
Google will have a tough time completely removing the Flash plugin from Chrome. There are still a ton of fringe sites out there which use Flash, and while this move would encourage them to move to HTML5, there’s no great solution for some which use the technology to deliver browser-based games. We can’t imagine a future where Flash will be completely obsoleted, but it’s still practically on its deathbed.
This is all sure to be welcome news to mobile users as it could help reduce the roadblocks users come to whenever their Flash-less phones visit a website with this dying technology.
[Google via Ars Technica]