GOOGLE STEADILY REPLACING ADOBE FLASH WITH HTML5 PACKAGES

Google might just be looking to be the ones to nail the final fastener in the coffin that has been made for the Adobe Flash plugin, and next year is when they plan to bury the entire program alive. Adobe is a software development company that is known for its efforts in the development of various software to handle a lot of tasks. Spanning from the simple reading of books and pdf files to web services such as the creation of websites with the Dreamweaver package and also, their plugin service has also been a core and integral part of Google’s Chrome browser for a while now. Due to the sleekness and easy adaptability of this plugin, it has also been the one that is used by a lot of other vendors but Google has to be the biggest customer, and they might soon lose the search engine giant to the sellers of HTML scripts.

In Google’s new plan, they have made a provision to push out the HTML5 as an upgrade to the Chrome, as opposed to Flash which had been the running member of this position for years now. The fact that they have not totally ended their support for Flash is not out of respect for the deal that they have had in the past but because by default, they have to still serve the plugin for the sake of some top ten domains that base their operations on the plugin. This means that as soon as the plan goes live, scheduled to take effect from this fourth quarter of the year, Google Chrome would start to show the HTML5 scripts should it be available. In the case that additional support is needed from the Flash plugin, there would be a prompt that asks users if they want it to be enabled or not. In a way, the Adobe Flash plugin has been relegated to the background and is just there as a dormant partner. It would not be surprising if Chrome did away with it totally in the future.

In the preparation for a life after the Adobe Flash plugin, we have to say that this move has been coming for years and the expiry date of the plugin was a matter of ‘when’, not ‘if’. The plugin has been a potential security risk to the Chrome Brower for years now, and if Google wants to promise users that their browsing data (passwords, cache, cookies, and the likes) are safe, they should be able to make calls such as this. There has also been the issue of vulnerabilities popping up daily with the Flash, showing loopholes in the coding and design that could be easily exploited. With these kinds of observations and much more, the market has been taking aa break from the whole plugin business and have been migrating towards HTML5 instead.

The relationship that exists between Google and Flash hasn’t been exactly smooth up till now, and any individual that has been paying close attention to each upgrade that the Chrome gets would know this. Over time, especially with the release of the Chrome 45, Flash started to get pushed to the back stage, and Chrome would only display the ads and animated content if it had to. As they have now shifted away from that scene, Chrome would now be better focused on the central content of web pages, such as games and videos. To make things as transparent as can be, Google has released a list of what the change is supposed to address and cause, and we think that they have done well in their regards.

As previously stated, the whitelist confirms that Flash would still come with future versions of the Google Chrome browser, but it would lose its status as the plugin that had access to defeat advertisement. It states that when a user accesses a website that has HTML5 encoding possible, the default experience of such a user would be changed to match the configurations of this website. However, should there still be a need for the Flash player? The top of the page would reveal a prompt that allows the user either enable or block Flash’s action. To avoid getting prompts every time, Chrome would save your choice as the default for such a website and keep a whitelist of your top 10 websites where you want Flash enabled. After one year, this list expires, and you get to make a new one.

The whitelist has been enabled on the websites that Google feels its users use the most, and this is to save them from always having to answer prompts. The websites that are to be featured on this Flash whitelist by default are Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, Yandex, VK, Live, OK, Twitch, Amazon, and Mail.ru. These are, to be candid, intelligent choices by Google, and they hope to update the list as they see fit too.  As long as a site has been seen to warrant no exception, it would be removed from the whitelist and probably replied by another one. This would, of course, be determined by the flux of users on each platform.

The Flash is running out (no pun intended) of luck, and HTML5 is slowly taking over the market.