It looks like Google is planning to slowly phase out Flash for its Chrome browser. The internet giant recently made a post calling developers to use “HTML5 by Default”, and this feature will come into effect by Q4 2016.
Don’t be too worried though, Google will not completely stop supporting Flash on its browser. With “HTML5 by Default”, Chrome will pick HTML5 content when available. If there’s no HTML5 on board, Google will ask you to activate Flash before playing the Flash content. The only exception will be for the 10 most popular sites using Flash including YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitch and more.
“This change reflects the maturity of HTML5 and its ability to deliver an excellent user experience. While Flash historically has been critical or rich media on the web, today in many cases HTML5 provides a more integrated media experience with faster load times and lower power consumption.” – Anthony LaForge, Technical Program Manager at Google.
This isn’t Google’s first attempt in phasing out Flash. The company started enabling Flash blocking about a year ago however, only on a very small scale and it was to help preserve battery life. This has become an default setting now, which will “intelligently” pause unnecessary content.
