Google put another nail in Adobe’s coffin with newly announced plans to block the buggy software from loading automatically to Chrome users by the end of this year.
Chrome, now the world’s most popular web browser, is phasing out plans to support Adobe’s Flash Player to all but 10 websites by the end of the year. Soon, Google’s plan is to let people access Flash-enabled websites only on a site-by-site basis with a prompt warning the dangers of it, rather than letting the software automatically load as it currently does.
The plan is to allow Flash on 10 websites that heavily rely on it, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Yahoo and Amazon until the end of 2017. Many of those platforms are shifting to HTML5, a more reliable and safer piece of software, anyway.
Flash isn’t being completely scrubbed from Chrome; it will still be baked in the software. But disabling it from it automatically loading is a way to nudge developers and websites to make the switch from error-prone Flash to the web’s increasingly preferred software of HTML5.
Google’s war on Flash is well documented. The software giant has already banned Flash-based ads from loading on Chrome and is in the midst of weeding out the software from its Google Display Network.
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