14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe Flash Player is slowly but surely moving towards its final days, as Google has started blocking it by default in the latest version of Chrome browser.
After haunting us for many years with security flaws and performance issues, Adobe Flash Player is now blocked in the world’s two most popular browsers, as both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox attempt to load the HTML5 version of websites by default.
Chrome blocking Flash Player is a move that Google announced earlier this year, when the search giant revealed that HTML5 would be preferred in its browser starting with the fourth quarter of the year, and Chrome 55 is the first version that introduces this change.
Furthermore, Google Chrome 53 was the first version to prepare this transition, as it started blocking page analytics and other elements built in Flash, while version 54 introduced an option that transitioned YouTube Flash players to HTML5.
Available options
Users, however, are still provided with several options should they want Adobe Flash Player instead of HTML5 and they can also tweak the default behavior of Chrome 55. Options available in “Content settings” in the configuration screen of the browsers enable them to “allow sites to run Flash,” “detect and run important Flash content,” and “block sites from running Flash” (the third option is enabled by default).
There’s also an exception field which users can turn to if they want the browser to ignore settings, so they can, for example, configure the websites that they want Chrome to load with Flash instead of HTML5.
Google, however, is giving users an easy way to deal with websites where HTML5 is not available, so the browser prompts them to enable Flash whenever it’s needed.
Additionally, this behavior can be disabled by default if you don’t like Google Chrome to choose HTML5 instead of Flash Player - although there’s pretty much no good reason to do this, especially because Adobe’s software has often been described as one of the most insecure solutions on the market.
What you need to do is type “about:flags” in the address bar and look for the option that says “Prefer HTML over Flash” and set it to “disabled.” By default, this option is configured to “default,” which in version 55 means it’s enabled.
Even though it blocks Flash Player by default, Google Chrome will continue to come with it built-in, so security updates would still be provided whenever Adobe releases them.