Since the beginning of this year, Google has been in favour of replacing Flash with HTML5 ,that allows quicker load times, lower power consumption and an overall richer experience. Flash had been excluded from Google’s advertising network already, and now everything on Google Chrome will be supported by HTML5.
At the moment, Flash works behind the scenes to support things like page analytics, that make the processing speed slow and worsens the user experience. Hyper Text Markup Language(5) is used to create websites and media content that is generally very light and fast.
Up until now, users needed to download a plugin to view the flash content on a webpage. HTML5 on the other had works seamlessly without the need of an additional plugin to view content in a richer format. In fact, HTML5 works on smartphones and devices that do not even support Flash.
Starting September, the latest version Google Chrome 53 will begin to block any flash content on its application. Google’s blog mentions, “HTML5 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.”
If you’re on Google Chrome, you might have to say bye-bye to your favourite websites that use Flash content only, unless you are okay with enabling Flash every time. This will also affect millions of people who play games and just browse content supported by Flash.
How does it affect you?
If you have not been able to view flash content on your smartphones and other devices, specifically Apple devices, it is quite likely your device did not support flash. In fact, it has been seen that Flash runs extremely slow on Linux and Mac OS X, since it does not have access to the GPU.
Google Chrome for iOS devices should now be able to play a large variety of content, that utilized Flash earlier. There won’t be a need to download Adobe Flash player separately. The page loading time will be lower and much convenient to you.
Users might also see a slight improvement in battery life as HTML5 doesn’t suck much power from your phone. Since Flash is more intensive on the processor, it generates heat and wears out the battery faster. Security wise, both the technologies are prone to attacks but HTML5 is relatively safer and provides a much better feedback.
From December 2016, Chrome 55 will make HTML5 the default experience, except for websites that only use Flash. From 2017, you’ll be prompted to enable flash one a one-by-one basis, depending on the website, since all websites will be HTML5 by default.
Google is also encouraging developers to switch to HTML5 from Flash as it sees a lot of advantages. If you’re not happy with this decision from Google, you can definitely switch to other browsers like Opera Mini and Firefox that use Flash by default.
Source: Chrome Blog
