Google Chrome to block Adobe Flash by the end of the year

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.

https://digiday.com/?p=178351

More in Media

Meta AI rolls out several enhancements across apps and websites with its newest Llama 3

Meta AI, which first debuted in September, also got a number of updates including ways to search for real-time information through integrations with Google and Bing.

Walmart rolls out a self-serve, supplier-driven insights connector

The retail giant paired its insights unit Luminate with Walmart Connect to help suppliers optimize for customer consumption, just in time for the holidays, explained the company’s CRO Seth Dallaire.

Research Briefing: BuzzFeed pivots business to AI media and tech as publishers increase use of AI

In this week’s Digiday+ Research Briefing, we examine BuzzFeed’s plans to pivot the business to an AI-driven tech and media company, how marketers’ use of X and ad spending has dropped dramatically, and how agency executives are fed up with Meta’s ad platform bugs and overcharges, as seen in recent data from Digiday+ Research.