Google is banning Flash from its Chrome browser

Vaughn Highfield May 16, 2016

The world’s relationship with Flash content has been declining ever since Apple’s Steve Jobs penned his “Thoughts on Flash” piece. Since then both Apple and Google have moved away from the service and many security flaws have been discovered within Adobe’s product. Now, though, Google is looking to deal yet another blow to the web player by blocking Flash content within Chrome.

Google is banning Flash from its Chrome browser

Pinned to happen at the end of this year, Google plans to block Flash on nearly all websites by default. If, for some reason, you wish to enable flash, you could do so on a site-by-site basis.

According to Google, the only sites that would have Flash enabled by default are the “top 10 domains using Flash”, helping to avoid issues around compatibility. This means that YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitch, Amazon and some others would be exempt. Even then, this only sounds like a one-year pass, giving each site owner enough time to remove Flash from their pages before Google permanently drops the ban-hammer on Flash content.

If, like me, you already despise Flash and want it gone from you computer, you can actually already enable Google Chrome to automatically block all Flash content. Delve into Chrome’s preferences page under privacy > content settings and you’ll find an option to “choose when to run plugin content”. Enabling this will block all Flash content until you tell Chrome you want to run it.

Due to the problems surrounding flash, it’s unlikely Google’s move is going to upset anyone all that much. But just remember that if you’re still the sort who loves a blast on Newgrounds now and again, it may soon not work by default.