Google announced yesterday in an official blog post that moving forward, its Chrome browser will de-emphasize Flash in favor of HTML5, while highlighting how the latter is much lighter and faster, and publishers are switching over to speed up page loading and save you more battery life. “You’ll see an improvement in responsiveness and efficiency for many sites”, says Google.
Today, more than 90% of Flash on the web loads behind the scenes to support things like page analytics. This kind of Flash slows you down, and starting this September, Chrome 53 will begin to block it.
This is similar to a change we made last September, when some Flash content became click-to-play with Chrome 42. This had an immediate, positive impact for our users by improving page load times and saving battery power.
By the end of 2016, Google says that Chrome will make HTML5 the default experience, except for sites which only support Flash. For these sites, users will be prompted to enable Flash when they first visit the site.
Google also notes that it will continue to work closely with Adobe to ensure that the overall web experience is as fast and secure as possible and to help the Web transition to HTML5.
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Flash is dead
Steve Jobs approves this message
First sentence, “latter” not “later.”
If only they believed Steve Jobs like a century ago, they’d have saved everyone lots of time!