Adobe Flash has continued to make the news over the past year with security experts calling for its death as quickly as possible. Unfortunately it’s been the opposite and its death has been drawn out over the months, with numerous organisations removing it from their platforms. For instance, five months ago, Facebook was one of the companies that led the charge, replacing Flash with HTML 5 in their videos. Mozilla was another company who blocked Flash in their Firefox browser.
Now, Google has joined the queue of companies getting rid of the diseased software. Later this year the company is expected to release a consumer version of Google Chrome that will force websites to render animations and videos in HTML 5 instead of Adobe Flash, effectively blocking the latter and pretending it never existed in the first place.
However, there will be a year long period where the 10 biggest websites that use Flash, such as YouTube, will be exempt from this. This is to ensure that people don’t get inundated with requests asking them to allow the switch. Furthermore, users can choose to let specific websites display content in Flash, but they would have to opt into it.
Currently users can disable Adobe Flash via Chrome’s settings.
Adobe themselves have admitted the security flaws in Adobe Flash and as a result there probably won’t be much of a fight against this change in Chrome. A recent security flaw’s safeguard was to uninstall the software.
