Google Chrome is ditching Flash in favor of HTML5 starting from September this year, in line with an earlier announcement it had made in May to cut off ties with the former. The search giant announced the news in a blog post, explaining its reasoning for the move.
According to Google’s research, more than 90% of Flash online loads behind the scenes to support components like page analytics. The company claims that this kind of Flash slows down users considerably. In order to combat the lag, it plans to block Adobe Flash Player in Chrome 53 starting from September.
This will eventually escalate in Google Chrome version 55 in December which will make HTML5 the default experience. The company has been planning this transition for quite a while now. For instance, some Flash content was transformed into click-to-play back in September last year.
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This decision apparently had an immediate positive impact among Chrome consumers by reducing page load times and battery power consumed. The eventual shift towards HTML5 is meant to further this agenda. Google asserts that the platform is lighter and faster, with clearly noticeable improvements in responsiveness and efficiency across a number of websites.
Of course, quite a few sites only support Flash. Chrome is making an exception for such pages. Anyone who visits these websites will be prompted to enable Flash when they first open it. Google went on to acknowledge the contributions Flash made towards shaping the Web and crafting the modern set of web standards.
Google plans to continue working closely with Adobe during this transition towards HTML5. A number of other browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Edge are looking to switch to the latter as well.