Flash will be ‘click-to-play’ in Google Chrome by the end of the year

Google Chrome will block flash elements on the web by default before the end of the year. Users can then still use Flash in the browser, but they must indicate per website that Flash may still be activated.

The decision is apparent from a post on the Chromium developer forum. Anthony LaForge, leader of the Chrome development team, outlines a plan to implement the new Flash policy in the last quarter of this year. Flash will be blocked on the web by default and Chrome will deploy an HTML5 alternative if the website in question offers it. Only when that alternative is not available will users be able to indicate that they still want to use Flash on that website. An exception is made for what the development team calls the ten largest Flash-using websites. Those are YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, Live, Twitch, Amazon and others. This exception is valid for one year, so until around the end of 2017.

In 2015, Google announced that “non-essential Flash content” would be frozen by default in the Chrome browser. The decision was made in view of the speed of the browser and the possible battery life of the device that Chrome runs on.

With the decision, the development team is trying to give extra momentum to the migration from Flash to, for example, HTML5, which has proven to be more efficient and economical in practice. It has been known for some time that Flash is inferior to the competition in those areas. In fact, Flash developer Adobe itself indicated in December 2015 that it sees HTML5 as the future and warned this month about zero-day vulnerabilities in the software. In 2015, Mozilla also blocked the Flash plugin in its Firefox browser, but that was a temporary measure.