The days of Adobe Flash Player is near as Google has started blocking Flash by default in the latest version of the Chrome browser.
Flash has been haunting the industry for many years with its security flaws and also performance issues. Flash is now blocked in the world’s top two browsers which are both Google Chrome and Firefox. These websites now load HTML5 version of the website by default.
Earlier this year Google has mentioned that it is going to block the Flash Player and now the search jaint has taked its move. It also said that HTML5 would be preferred in its browser from the fourth quarter of the year, and Chrome 55 is the first version that come with this change included.
Furthermore, Google Chrome 53 was the first version to prepare this transition, as it started blocking page analytics and other elements built in Flash, while version 54 introduced an option that transitioned YouTube Flash players to HTML5.
Users, however, are still provided with several options should they want Adobe Flash Player instead of HTML5 and they can also tweak the default behavior of Chrome 55. Options available in “Content settings” in the configuration screen of the browsers enable them to “allow sites to run Flash,” “detect and run important Flash content,” and “block sites from running Flash” (the third option is enabled by default).
There’s also an exception field which users can turn to if they want the browser to ignore settings, so they can, for example, configure the websites that they want Chrome to load with Flash instead of HTML5.
Google, however, is giving users an easy way to deal with websites where HTML5 is not available, so the browser prompts them to enable Flash whenever it’s needed.
Additionally, this behavior can be disabled by default if you don’t like Google Chrome to choose HTML5 instead of Flash Player – although there’s pretty much no good reason to do this, especially because Adobe’s software has often been described as one of the most insecure solutions on the market.
