Google Chrome Will Disable Adobe Flash By Default By The End Of This Year

Image courtesy of Krossbow

Google is continuing on its anti-Adobe Flash quest with a new effort to make HTML5 the default on its Chrome browser by the end of the year.

Flash will be disabled on Chrome on basically every site in the fourth quarter of 2016, Google said in a post titled “HTML5 by Default” (h/t Ars Technica).

Chrome will continue to ship with Flash, but it won’t be advertised by default. If a site offers HTML5, that’s what Chrome will use to run it. If a site needs Flash, a pop-up prompt will appear at the top of the page when the user first visits it, and will provide an option of running or declining to run Flash.

“If the user accepts, Chrome will advertise the presence of Flash Player and refresh the page,” Google said. Your choice should hold through every visit to that site thereafter, at least for now.

The top 10 sites that rely on Flash — including YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, and Amazon — will receive a temporary reprieve. Eventually, however, even those sites will have to make the move: after a year there will be no whitelist, and Flash will have to be enabled on every site that tries to use it.

Flash has been under fire for a while now for being one of the buggiest, crashiest (now a word), least secure, most vulnerable pieces of software ever to hit the web: along with Google’s efforts to scrub it from the internet, Amazon, Facebook, and Firefox have also taken actions to send it to that software pasture in the sky.

Here’s the list of 10 whiteslisted sites that will still run Flash by default — for now:

1. YouTube.com
2. Facebook.com
3. Yahoo.com
4. VK.com
5. Live.com
6. Yandex.ru
7. OK.ru
8. Twitch.tv
9. Amazon.com
10. Mail.ru

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