The slow demise of Adobe Flash continues as Chrome blocks Flash ads
Adobe鈥檚 once-ubiquitous Flash technology has been losing popularity for years now, as websites phase it out in favor of newer, more flexible standards such as HTML5 video.
This week, Flash鈥檚 death by a thousand cuts continues: Google鈥檚 Chrome browser began blocking Flash ads on Tuesday, pausing animations unless users click on the ad to allow them to load.
Google鈥檚 rationale, laid out in a in June, is that Flash makes web pages take longer to load, draining battery more quickly on mobile devices and generally degrading users鈥� online experiences. Animated ads that use HTML5 will still load automatically, since they use fewer system resources and often don鈥檛 take as long to load. Google even wrote a to convert Flash ads to HTML5, in an effort to help out advertisers.
More than 63 percent of all web users use Chrome, web developer site W3Schools, so having Flash ads blocked on Chrome is a big deal. From a user perspective, the change is probably a good thing: not only will pages load faster, but will no longer be available for hackers to exploit. (Earlier this year, Mozilla temporarily disabled Flash by default in the Firefox browser after a was discovered that could have allowed an attacker to crash, or even take over, a system.)
Yet Flash鈥檚 slow demise may not necessarily be good for the web as a whole, Julia Greenberg at Wired. Instead of placing Flash ads with small publishers who depend on the revenue to stay afloat, publishers could lean more heavily on Facebook and Google鈥檚 AdWords platform. 鈥淭hat could ultimately mean fewer choices for readers,鈥� she writes.
Still, advertisers have the option to convert animated Flash ads to HTML5, allowing them to play unimpeded on Chrome or any other browser. And since HTML5 is supported across all modern computers, tablets, and smartphones, developers won鈥檛 have to code separate versions of advertisements for different platforms.
There鈥檚 been a healthy debate going on this year between publishers, advertisers, tech companies, and users about how Internet advertising should work. Many users, creeped out by online ads鈥� intrusiveness and the collection of personal data, have opted to install ad-blockers, which improve security and speed up browsing, but also starve sites of the revenue they need to survive. In response, some sites have tried running messages asking users to disable their ad-blockers, and some sites have partnered with companies such as Adblock Plus to allow 鈥渦nobtrusive ads鈥� to be displayed by default.
Now, with Flash ads disabled on Chrome by default, online advertisers must come up with new methods of reaching users. Most sites rely on advertising revenue as their bread and butter, so they need their ads to be seen by users 鈥� or at least loaded by those users鈥� web browsers.
