Google Is Taking a Big Step to Kill Off Flash for Good

[Zippyjuan]

http://www.wired.com/2015/08/google-flash-ads/

Stops the ads from automatically playing but does not completely block them.

STARTING TOMORROW, GOOGLE’S Chrome browser will automatically pause web ads that use Flash.

That means that videos and animations in ads using Adobe’s Flash technology will no longer autoplay in the world’s most-used browser. Ads using HTML5, on the other hand, will continue to work.

The decision, first revealed in June on Google+, is the latest nail in Flash’s coffin, which is great news for the web: Flash is a bloated, insecure battery hog, and it deserves to die.

Fortunately, Google doesn’t appear to be the only organization that feels that way. Last month, Mozilla blocked Flash from running on its Firefox browser until Adobe released a new version that fixed some particularly egregious security problems that were revealed in a leak of security company Hacking Team’s internal documents. Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos also recently called on browser makers to stop supporting Flash altogether. In anticipation of that development, Facebook has slowly been replacing its own videos with HTML5-based alternatives.

Advertisers have been the big pro-Flash holdouts, but Amazon has said that it will no longer accept Flash advertisement on its network of sites. Google’s move to pause Flash ads is even bigger; it could be just the push the industry needs to finally move on to better technologies.

[GunnyFreedom]

OOhh does this mean I can finally turn off adblock on RPF's? The auto-scroll auto-play videos made the site completely unuseable and I was getting autoplay videos at like 8 of 10 page loads.

[fisharmor]

Yeah, and Chrome recently removed Java support, too.
The problem is, there are millions of people still using this stuff.
Do you know how many people play flash based online games? Do you know how much money is rolling around in that?
Let alone Java.... that alone was reason for me to remove Chrome from all my machines.

Google makes decisions like this all the time and not all of them are good or well reasoned out. I don't know how many of you remember that Google had a fully functional real estate search that did everything that realtor.com and zillow.com do now... like 8 years ago. They removed it because they couldn't figure out how to make money on it, so that whole market went to other companies.

Just because Google doesn't like it or won't support it, doesn't mean it's going to die. They've been talking about killing Flash for like a decade now, and it still hasn't happened. That's like half of the entire internet's existence.

When Google comes out with the open-source alternative to flash, great, it'll happen, but until they decide to stop just trying to kill things, and actually give us an alternative, it ain't gonna happen.

[amy31416]

I use a Chrome-based laptop and so far I like it much more than other laptops I've used.

[unconsious767]

I have flash disabled in firefox, only need to turn it on for certain video sites, it frightens me.

[CPUd]

Yeah, and Chrome recently removed Java support, too.
The problem is, there are millions of people still using this stuff.
Do you know how many people play flash based online games? Do you know how much money is rolling around in that?
Let alone Java.... that alone was reason for me to remove Chrome from all my machines.

Google makes decisions like this all the time and not all of them are good or well reasoned out. I don't know how many of you remember that Google had a fully functional real estate search that did everything that realtor.com and zillow.com do now... like 8 years ago. They removed it because they couldn't figure out how to make money on it, so that whole market went to other companies.

Just because Google doesn't like it or won't support it, doesn't mean it's going to die. They've been talking about killing Flash for like a decade now, and it still hasn't happened. That's like half of the entire internet's existence.

When Google comes out with the open-source alternative to flash, great, it'll happen, but until they decide to stop just trying to kill things, and actually give us an alternative, it ain't gonna happen.

html5 + javascript can do just about anything flash can.

[Warrior_of_Freedom]

Calling flash bloated is bull$#@!. Flash video on youtube ran much faster than html 5 video and used less resources. The reason a lot of flash content was slow was because of the antialiasing on vector graphics

[timosman]

DRM in HTML is finally approved so no need for flash to control what you can watch.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...ret-vote.shtml

[fisharmor]

html5 + javascript can do just about anything flash can.

And we have had some time to see what people are doing with html5.
They are making pandora interfaces that needlessly resize components so it's impossible to click on the "show all playlists" button. But it looks soooooo good that we all forget that not a $#@!ing year ago we saw all the playlists all the time in a boring old fashioned scroll list.
Best not to think about how little we are getting out of html5 and what it cost all of us to ditch flash.
Let's all go utterly fail to find what we want to watch on Netflix. You know, not because it's not there, but because the interface is $#@!ing impenetrable, courtesy html5.