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."

Comments

Just fucking remove it already

[Anonymous Coward]

It's never going to go away if we keep supporting it

Google Grow a Pair

[avandesande]

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.

Re:Google Grow a Pair

[Barefoot Monkey]

I find that the vast majority of sites that ask for Flash when it's set to "ask to activate"/"click-to-play" will work just fine when Flash is set to "never activate" or removed entirely.

Have a look at this fairly typical code to play a video file:

    <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="player.swf">
        <param name="file" value="video.mkv">
        <video src="video.mkv">
    </object>

If Flash is installed it uses the embedded Flash applet "player.swf" to play the video, otherwise it simply plays the video directly. However, when Flash is click-to-play, the object element is treated as an opaque placeholder until the user clicks it, whereupon Flash becomes activated.

I don't know the details on how Google is "de-emphasising" Flash, but I'd imagine that they check to see whether the object has child elements other than <param> inside, and replace it with the click-to-play placeholder only if it does not instead of doing so all the time.

Re:Google Grow a Pair

[mysidia]

The fact that it's still alive is largely due to Google's unwillingness to take the same hard line.

Microsoft and Mozilla's same unwillingness.

Also, a thousand or more software developers who have made Flash support integral to enterprise projects.

E.g. VMware vSphere's and vCloud directors' requirements for Flash to manage the virtualization systems and management platforms.

Re:Flash? What's that?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can disable in chrome via chrome://plugins, Adobe Flash Player, disable.

I've had it disabled for well over a year.

Disjointed actions from Google

[subk]

Gee, that's great, but when is the Google Play Music team gonna get off their asses and fix HTML5 support??

Why Slashdot doesn't do Unicode (5:erocS)

[tepples]

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.

Homestar Runner; Weebl's Stuff; Newgrounds

[tepples]

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?

Re:It'll be interesting

[NotInHere]

They'll still allow it. Until google decides to drop flash support, nothing will really happen. Really, they should simply say that flash will be removed on Jan 01 2018, and then every site will abandon flash. Or even better: lower the score in google search results if a site uses flash and has no js fallback. That's the biggest power google has, it works wonders.

Re:Shame on Scroogle or I mean Google!

[NotInHere]

HTML5 wasn't ready back then. It now is, at least sort of. You can do everything with HTML5 AFAIK maybe except super custom DRM or stuff.

Re:Shame on Scroogle or I mean Google!

[brantondaveperson]

You can do everything with HTML5 that you can do with flash, other than easily disable it.

Clever of them, don't you think?