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Google: Chrome 53 Will 'De-Emphasize Flash In Favor of HTML5' Next Month (venturebeat.com)
Google announced in a blog post today that Chrome will officially start to "de-emphasize Flash in favor of HTML5." VentureBeat reports: "In September 2016, Chrome will block Flash content that loads behind the scenes, which the company estimates accounts for more than 90 percent of the Flash on the web. In December, Chrome will make HTML5 the default experience for central content, such as games and videos, except on sites that only support Flash."
Google detailed next month's plan (design doc), when Chrome 53 will be released: "In September 2015, we made 'Detect and run important plugin content' the default plugin setting in Chrome, automatically pausing any cross-origin plugin content smaller than 400px in width or 300px in height. This behavior has an exception for any plugin content that is 5x5 or smaller or is an undefined size, because there was no canonical way of detecting viewability until Intersection Observer was standardized and implemented. We would now like to remove this exception and instead not load tiny, cross-origin content. If the user has their plugin setting set to the default of 'Detect and run important plugin content,' the browser will not instantiate cross-origin plugin content that is roughly 5x5 or smaller or has an undefined size. An icon will be displayed in the URL bar indicating that plugin content is not running, allowing the user to reload the page with plugin content running or open settings to add a site-wide exception. Other choices of the plugin content setting are unaffected by this launch."
It's never going to go away if we keep supporting it
This should stop a whole bunch of XSS exploitation and poisoning that's going on.
Uninstalled it years ago, haven't missed it since.
Just remove it. Sure you will lose maybe .5% of users but you will put a stake in the heart of the monster, and those lost users will come back eventually.
love is just extroverted narcissism
"content that is 5Ãf--5 or smaller"
(the jumble above is the correct spelling of 'angstrom'.)
So, yes, that's quite small. It can probably be removed without dire consequences ...
Or is it that slashdot doesn't recognize common text standards?
...omphaloskepsis often...
Disabled both of those crappy things last year, don't miss it at all.
Gee, that's great, but when is the Google Play Music team gonna get off their asses and fix HTML5 support??
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
There was a time when Slashdot tried to support character encodings properly. Then vandals had to mess it up by embedding bidirectional override characters that broke the layout and spoofed moderation scores, and other vandals started using box drawing and CJK characters to make obscene glyph art. After this, Slashdot started to apply a code point whitelist. Yet somehow SoylentNews has implemented working UTF-8.
So people started restarting Chrome today, and the latest version breaks videos if they dont habe SAR (source aspect ratio) metadata in the file.
If you view the raw video in chrome, it appears the same in chrome 51, but if you use it in a page its weirdly stretched - for our site it came out wide.
Anyone else notice this? It's fixable if you use ffmpeg to set SAR to 1:1, but that's a lot of reprocessing.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
If Google grows a pair as you suggest, then existing vector animations using Flash (Homestar Runner, Weebl and Bob, Animutations, and user contributions to Newgrounds) will become unusable. Even if these are "and nothing of value was lost" to your personal taste, they aren't "and nothing of value was lost" to all viewers. Rendering the SWF to pixels and encoding the result in WebM is an imperfect solution, as it loses interactivity (a lot of SWFs on Newgrounds are games). It also bloats file size by a factor of ten in my tests, which isn't helpful for users on slow or harshly capped connections. So going forward, what will be the recommended way to exhibit old and new vector animations?
I'll be curious to see how Chrome handles sites like Reuters, where they mystifyingly try to force Flash down your throat if you're not on a mobile device - even if Flash isn't installed.
#DeleteChrome
HTML5 is splintered mess that is in no way a replacement for the capabilities of the Flash ecosystem.
In the meantime, where is WebAssembly?
I love going backwards - what a privilege to have to watch.
Shame on Google for supported Flash in the first place! Apple started to get rid of it and everyone else was slowly following until Google announced they are embedding it in Chrome, just to childishly dis Apple! It should have never been included in Chrome!
People who developed content for a proprietary platform are subject to the whims of the platform owner. In this case, the whims of Adobe primarily involve failing to patch security holes and allowing widespread use of their platform for user-hostile purposes. They could have invested in security, and policed Flash usage. They chose not to, and now Adobe (and their users) are paying the price.
Sadly, Flash is not going away. As I understand TFA, the new version of Chrome will still work just fine with Flash content. It will just ask the user before playing it. If someone wants to see your Flash application, they still can. However, unwanted Flash (primarily in ads) will finally be dead.
Do note: Even if Flash finally dies, Flash applications will remain perfectly usable: Put a copy of Flash on a VM, get copies of anything you care about off the web, and you can run it forever.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
If Google grows a pair as you suggest, then existing vector animations using Flash (Homestar Runner, Weebl and Bob, Animutations, and user contributions to Newgrounds) will become unusable.
Frankly, so what? Flash will still be available for those who want it. And even if it died completely starting tomorrow and we lose a few works of art forever (which won't happen), I would still consider it a fair exchange considering the problems Flash has caused and continues to cause. Those authors made their product in a proprietary format. Live by the sword, die by the sword. If someone cares enough to bother to preserve the animations then they'll be preserved.
To be honest though I haven't even thought about Homestar Runner in over a decade and I've never even heard of those others. Obviously it isn't something I would quickly miss.
js+html+canvas API is a perfect way to encode vector animations, with similar compression ratios (assuming transport compression) as flash.
I agree that Canvas or SVG would be the ideal solution going forward. Have you tried any non-Adobe tools for authoring such animations that you're willing to recommend? I don't want to rely on Adobe Animate because it's available only for rental.
For legacy content, there is shumway.
If Shumway could replace Flash Player the way pdf.js replaced the Adobe Reader plug-in, that would be great. But as far as I can tell, Mozilla canceled Shumway. There hasn't been a status report in over a year, and the graph of contributions to Git appears to have flatlined over the past 11 months.
I care enough.
I rest my case. If it's something that matters, odds are good that someone will preserve it. Actually many things that don't matter get preserved too. I'm routinely astonished at how sentimental people get. I used to work in the auction business so I've seen some things you wouldn't believe in that regard... People love to collect.
But almost all countries also have a life plus 50 year or more copyright regime. So how should I go about tracking down the author of each such animation and seeking his permission to preserve it?
You're presuming the author wants to have it preserved. They might not. But let's assume they do. You might have to do some leg work to find them. That's part of the deal with copyright. But honestly that may be the easiest problem to solve. How you plan to actually preserve the work could be actually much harder since it was created in a proprietary product depending on what you plan to do to preserve it.
Yeah, that's nice and all, but I hope they fix Google Play Music to use an HTML5 player before kicking Flash to the curb.
With two billion web users, even half a percent are ten million.
We've got a whole month to redevelop our video streaming platform from the ground up.