Google has something against flash; don’t ask me – I don’t know what it is, but it’s there.Then again who deosn’t have an issue with flash? IT has security flaws and drains battery – to name but a few reasons to NOT use flash. Anyways, Google has been klling flash a blow at a time and now; this blow is more severe than the rest. Note that this DOES NOT mean that flash will not run on Chrome; it will stiil run but this time around, you’l have to be absolutely sure you want it to run. Yes, there will be a prompt; you’ll have to click on “yes” or “allow” or something of the sort and flash will work on that site – but on that site only. If you want to run flash on another site, you’ll have to do the whole ritual again.
At least you’ll only have to do it once per site; anything other than that would have been worse than skipping ads – even Google doesn’t want that. This rule applies to all sites but 10 – yes, just 10. According to Google, these sites are the top 10 sites that use flash and have a lot of traffic – we’re talking in the millions here folks. We got a partial list:
- YouTube – something tells me this had a major role to play in the exemption thing.
- Twitch
- Amazon
But, hold on, this special treatment might last for just a year, after which they’ll get the prompts too like everyone else. The flip side to this is – lemme play devil’s advocate for a second here. With HTML5, the need for flash, is really dwindling and I bet most developers will have no choice but to switch to HTML 5 – except of course, they are willing to let a third or more of their visitors leave because the popups irritate them. You always have the option to use other browsers though. That brings us to the other part.
Flash sure leaves room for malicious contents and softwares to get into you device – I’m sure you’ve heard the news.
On another note, Chrome users might not feel this much if the site has a backup HTML 5 player – Chrome will just switch to this without asking you enable flash. Don’t fret folks, all these changes won’t come until the end of the year which is plenty of time for these sites to replace whatever flash content they have with HTML 5. So get to work, boys!
