This article, Google to hit pause on Flash ads in Chrome on September 1, originally appeared on ZDNet.com.
Google
will hammer one more nail in Flash’s coffin with a feature that will
soon prevent many Flash ads from displaying in Chrome desktop.
The
feature was rolled out to Chrome beta in June and will become generally
available on September 1. While Google won’t block Flash in Chrome
outright, it will only allow it to play “central content” like videos
while pausing peripheral content such as Flash animations.
Google said
yesterday that the feature will mean “pausing many Flash ads”. Chrome
users will be able to choose to run the Flash ads if they want, but
they’ll need to manually enable that in Chrome’s content settings.
Google
has described its shift away from Flash as a means of reducing Chrome’s
impact on battery life and performance on laptops, addressing one of
the chief complaints about its browser on Macs.
While
that’s true, a sideline benefit of marginalising Flash in Chrome is
that it could help drag the advertising industry away from one of the
main security threats to desktop computers. Flash vulnerabilities – many
of them found by Google’s researchers – are regularly targeted by
hackers, affecting both Windows and Mac users.
As
for advertisers that use Google’s AdWords, Google is already helping
them move away from Flash by automatically converting Flash to HTML5.
And there’s a wider push in the online advertising industry to boost the use of HTML5 in display advertising.
That means Flash isn’t going to disappear any time soon, as some would like, but the walls are closing in on the media player.
