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Chrome 45 Launches, Automatically Pauses Less Important Flash Content, Like Ads

Posted by Soulskill on from the hip-hip-hooray dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Google today launched Chrome 45 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android with some expected changes and new developer tools. First and foremost, Chrome now automatically pauses less important Flash content (rolling out gradually, so be patient). This has been a longtime coming from both Google and Adobe, with the goal to make Flash content more power-efficient in Chrome: In March, a setting was introduced to play less Flash content on the page, but it wasn't turned on by default, and in June, the option was enabled in the browser's beta channel. Now it's being turned on for everyone.

4 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. How does it know by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How does it know what is "important" Flash content, and what isn't?
    Fortunately, there's an option to not play any Flash content (unless started by user). That is a more useful feature, if you ask me.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. Flash is soooo bad... by pubwvj · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Flash is so bad that I run with it turned off by default. Anyone trying to Flash me must get my attention with the little FLASHED BLOCKED grey area which I then decide if it is worth it to trust them. Almost never.

    What Google is doing is a good thing.

    First they're demoting Flash and by inference saying it like GMOs is just plain bad.

    Second they can use known bad sources, patterns and crowd voting to find the offenders and just kill their content.

    Flash ads are awful. Perhaps this sort of vote against Flash will help kill Flash advertising while still allowing it for some useful content.

  3. Who cares about Flash now that HTML5 is here? by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I actually liked Flash being used for advertising on the Web, because I never installed Flash in the first place. It used to be my poor-man's ad-blocker long before that was a thing. But now that Flash is dying off, and with ubiquitous ad blockers, I now get confronted with the kind of flashy, power draining ads that I have always hated because everyone uses HTML5 video or canvas animations instead. I can tell when one loads because I can hear my poor little notebook's fan start chugging away as soon as the CPU-heavy ads start playing.

    I want to support my free web services by allowing reasonable advertising on websites, but not when they take over the resources on my computer.

  4. No more NPAPI by SpamSlapper · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This release also permanently removes support for NPAPI plugins.
    This was disabled by default in the last few releases, but could be turned back on. Now it is gone for good, along with support for a large number of plugins, including Microsoft Silverlight, some SharePoint features and some games like Battlefield 4 Battleblog
    Ouch.