Flash Will Soon Be 'Click-To-Run' in Microsoft Edge (bleepingcomputer.com)

Microsoft is following in the footsteps of other browser makers such as Apple, Google, and Mozilla, and says that upcoming Edge browser versions will favor HTML5 over Flash by default. From a report on BleepingComputer: "Sites that support HTML5 will default to a clean HTML5 experience," Microsoft said today. "In these cases, Flash will not even be loaded, improving performance, battery life, and security." On sites where Flash is needed, users will be prompted using a popup like the one seen below. Edge will ask users only once, and the browser will remember the user's choice for subsequent visits. Microsoft has already pushed these changes to Edge users on Windows Insiders builds. Regular Windows users will receive this update in the coming weeks.

Comments

HTML5 is nice and all

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

but on older devices, Flash media playback is faster. So much so that I can still watch Youtube videos fullscreen on my older Atom-powered netbook with Flash, when the HTML5 player is choppy and horrible in Firefox. If only they made it a tad faster just for fullscreen video playback, I'd uninstall Flash in a jiffy. But it's not gonna happen. Still, while I can, I'm holding onto Flash just for that, because my netbook ain't fast but it works fine.

MS is doing it wrong

[Tablizer]

The prompt asks "Do you want to run Flash for this site..." [paraphrased]

Ideally it should show a prompt or marker at the spot(s) on the page where the Flash markup is. Otherwise, it's hard to know what you are confirming, and you are confirming every Flash reference on the page once you confirm.

You may enable it to view a video, for example, but could also be opening up Flash spam on the side. Spammers will master this trick of baiting. Page-level confirmation is too course a confirmation granularity.