First we saw it on YouTube when Google made a conscious choice to ditch the aging Flash in favor of HTML5. As a result, now all major browsers support YouTube videos playing via HTML5 player.
However, Flash content isn’t limited to YouTube videos alone, as a matter of fact Adobe Flash Player also plays a pivotal role behind videos, gaming and animation on the web.
And so, Google continues to push for Flash depreciation throughout the web using another popular tool they currently possess – Google Chrome.
Over the course of a few months HTML5 will be gradually enabled by default for Chrome users. 1% of users of Chrome 55 stable will experience the change in the next few days. When Chrome 56 stable version will arrive in February, Google plans to enable it for all users.
Nonetheless users who would still rather use Flash could still do so by permitting it to run on a site-by-site basis when prompted.
In order not to overload users with prompts though, those would only be displayed on sites never visited before by the user and later on (once it’s standardized) all sites will require user permission to run Flash.
According to Google there’s a perfectly good reason for the move and it obviously serves users interest as well:
“… moving to HTML5 By Default [would] offer a safer, more power-efficient experience”
Says Google employee Eric Deily.
As we know, now that Chrome dominates the browsers realm it also holds the power to navigate the rest of the browsers to use certain technologies as the developers behind it sees fit and in this case, it’s most likely that the rest will soon follow.
