It’s no secret that for a bunch of reasons, the world doesn’t much care for Adobe’s Flash plugin. Even Adobe itself has begun moving away from it by promoting HTML5 content creation with its Animate CC development suite (which replaces Flash Professional).
Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen a number of websites begin to move away from Flash, with YouTube being a major example. Last summer, Mozilla even got in on the action by disabling insecure versions of Flash from running. Considering the fact that Flash has proven itself to be one of the most vulnerable pieces of software in history, it’s a really good thing that everyone seems to be in agreement that it needs to go.
While Google has been one of the companies championing the death of Flash, it’s really putting its money where its mouth is later this year when a new Chrome version will suddenly disable Flash for almost every website on Earth. “Almost” is because the company plans to allow Flash to continue running on extremely popular sites, such as Facebook and Amazon, to allow the shift to happen gradually, rather than all at once.
Perhaps the part of the market that will feel the shift the most is advertising, as an obscene number of advertisements still rely on Flash to run. This is no doubt one of the reasons so many people are against even basic advertising – no one wants to put themselves at risk. I still shudder when I need to install Java in order to attend a WebEx press conference. The quicker these severely buggy plugins that have overstayed their welcome die off for good, the better a place the Web can become. That’s the hope, at least.
If there’s a downside at all to Google’s move here, it’s that it’s not expected to happen until later this year. Perhaps killing Flash off in haste would actually be the better move, but at least a transition is coming.