Google to kill Flash and set Chrome default to HTML5

After circulating a draft proposal in May to effectively kill Adobe Flash and prioritize HTML5 by the end of the year, Google Chrome is going forward with the plan to “de-emphasize” Flash with a staged disabling of the plug-in through multiple versions of Chrome.

Starting with Chrome 53 in September, background Flash elements like page analytics will be blocked. According to Google, “Today, more than 90 percent of the Flash on the web loads behind the scenes to support things like page analytics. This kind of Flash slows you down, and starting this September, Chrome 53 will begin to block it. 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.”

The process isn’t expected to take too much time. By the time Chrome 55 hits in December, Google plans to have HTML5 as the only option for Chrome users — unless a site only supports Flash.

If you visit a Flash site, Google will prompt you to turn it on for that page. This approval only needs to be given the first time a user loads a Flash site, however and HTML5 will always be the default.