Microsoft Edge Will Start Automatically Pausing Less Important Flash Content (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader cites an article on VentureBeat: Microsoft Edge will "intelligently auto-pause" Flash content that is "not central to the webpage." If you want to try this out now, you can take the feature for a spin with Windows 10 build 14316, which was recently made available to Windows Insiders. Peripheral content like animations or advertisements built with Flash will be displayed in a paused state unless the user explicitly clicks to play that content. This significantly reduces power consumption and improves performance while preserving the full fidelity of the page. Flash content that is central to the page, like video and games, will not be paused. Microsoft wrote in a blog post, "We encourage the web community to continue the transition away from Flash and towards open web standards. We are planning for and look forward to a future where Flash is no longer necessary as a default experience in Microsoft Edge."

Comments

How about a real browser

[Billly Gates]

IE (yes you did not misread that) doesn't have the problem that edge has. Edge reminds of IE 6 or IE 7 when you go to a site like youtube. Constant refreezing.

I unpinned edge and pinned IE 11 on my windows 10 system for legacy sites still and Chrome for everything else. IE 11 is ok (not great), but MS in the past 4 years finally made a browser that didn't crash .... until Edge came out.

Re:How about a real browser

[Flavianoep]

Microsoft working with Linux, Firefox sucking, "IE is a real browser", the president of the US in Cuba... I get these days the SCO suit against Linux is the only thing holding the world together and preventing the hell from freezing over.

At least Flash is easy to block.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait until Flash dies and people use JavaScript to animate HTML5 tags and such. How are you going to selectively block that?

Re:At least Flash is easy to block.

[gmack]

Wait until Flash dies and people use JavaScript to animate HTML5 tags and such. How are you going to selectively block that?

Not that hard, at least in Chrome I use Disable HTML5 Autoplay plugin.
 

Re:At least Flash is easy to block.

[TheRaven64]

That only pauses video and audio tags, it doesn't pause things like canvases (or misc DOM elements) being animated by JavaScript. JavaScript has one big flat namespace for every script in a page, so it's difficult to identify the bits of the script relating to an ad if they're not in an iframe (and advertisers don't want to put them in iframes, because then they're trivial to filter out).

Re:At least Flash is easy to block.

[gstoddart]

Which is why Javascript also needs to be much more tightly controlled than simply running any damned thing on the page.

Your average web page has 10-20 3rd parties, all of which want to run javascript, flash, set cookies, and do a host of other crap. Advertising has pretty much fucked up the permission model of the internet by saying "you need to let every asshole run anything they want because you have no idea if it's part of the functionality of the site or an ad, but we just assume you'll let it all run".

Yeah, sorry, no. Flash is straight up disabled or uninstalled. I'll selectively whitelist sites who I trust, or at least temporarily do so. But almost no 3rd party scripts or content are EVER allowed ... because I don't want ads, and because I don't trust random web pages to run scripts. Because they're not trustworthy.

If Javascript has only one big namespace, then maybe that needs to be fixed? Security holes like cross-site scripting and other stuff are enabled by web sites insisting they be able to write the most presumptively insecure code and then let it be the user's problem.

This stuff needs to be sandboxed, treated like it's potentially hostile, and locked down from being able to do anything to the host computer. Instead what we have is stuff running which we have no idea what it is, which may or may not be malicious, and which can actively impact the host machine.

It's time we stopped treating web pages like they're trusted by default, because so much of the web these days simply can't be trusted.

Stop letting the advertisers tell us how the internet should work, and stop letting them be the ones who cause the damned thing to be insecure in the first place.

Option to Disable Autoplay

[ohnocitizen]

All browsers should have the ability to pause autoplay content (videos with sound especially) by default. This would be a game changer. Chrome has this: An article with an ironic autoplay advertisement.

Sounds like you need Servo.

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to try Servo. It's the next-generation browser engine from Mozilla and it's fantastic. It's written in Rust so it's beyond secure, because Rust is the most secure programming language ever created. Rust is also native compiled like C so it's fast. Some people have even found Rust to be faster than C! Rust is the next-generation programming language from Mozilla in case you aren't aware. Rust and Servo are the future. They're taking the current state of the art and bumping it up not just one notch, and not just two notches, but at least five or six notches. They've elevated the game and now it's time for the other browser vendors to start playing catch-up with Rust and Servo.

Re:Sounds like you need Servo.

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap, six notches! That's roughly four notches more then an average up-bumping.
Wow, im so excited over the amount of next-generationness it contains.

Knowing MS...

[Opportunist]

I have that hunch that Edge will rather pause the YouTube videos than the noisy ads.

Re:Where is this "important" flash content?

[Opportunist]

You missed a whole lots of 0day exploits. Your life must be incredibly boring.

Uh-huh.....

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

And by " less important" they mean "content for which the owners haven't paid us not to interfere with".