Adobe’s Flash technology just suffered another blow. Search engine giants, Google Inc. has announced it plans to phase out Flash support in its Chrome browser by default.
In a blog post, the company has detailed plans to start blocking Flash content within Chrome.
“Later this year we plan to change how Chromium hints to websites about the presence of Flash Player, by changing the default response of Navigator.plugins and Navigator.mimeTypes. If a site offers an HTML5 experience, this change will make that the primary experience. We will continue to ship Flash Player with Chrome, and if a site truly requires Flash, a prompt will appear at the top of the page when the user first visits that site, giving them the option of allowing it to run for that site,” the company says in the post.
As a result, Flash will still come bundled with Chrome, but “its presence will not be advertised by default.” Where the Flash Player is the only option for viewing content on a site, users will need to actively switch it on for individual sites. Enterprise Chrome users will also have the option of switching Flash off altogether.
However, Google will maintain support in the short-term for top 10 domains using the player, including; YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, VK, Live, Yandex, OK, Twitch, Amazon and Mail. But this whitelist is set to be periodically reviewed, with sites removed if they no longer warrant an exception, and the exemption list will expire after a year.
Google further adds, “Chrome will also be adding policy controls so that enterprises will be able to select the appropriate experience for their users, which will include the ability to completely disable the feature.”
