Chrome Will Begin Pausing Flash Ads By Default, Starting In September.
The latest developer version of Google’s Chrome browser kills one of the most hated things on the Internet: background audio from videos playing in other tabs.
GOOGLE HAS DELIVERED what could be the killer blow for the much maligned Adobe Flash runtime that has been the cause of so many insecurities it probably qualifies for a course of CBT and some Prozac.Now that Windows 10’s slick Action Center provides a home for system notifications, it seems like a no-brainer for Google to slip notifications pushed out by the Chrome browser in there, right?
Google will stop some Flash content from automatically playing starting Sept. 1, a move it decided on earlier this year to improve browser performance. For the lucky few not familiar, these are are videos that will play as soon as you load up a website — whether or not you want them to or even if you’re looking at that particular tab. According to a new post on Google+, the company says that, starting on September 1st, Chrome will begin to pause many Flash ads by default in order to improve performance for its users. Most of the web realises that HTML5 is the future, despite what Microsoft will tell you about Silverlight, a platform also not supported by Google, and calls have been mounting to kill off Flash once and for all. Flash, made by Adobe Systems, is still widely used for multimedia content, but security and performance issues have prompted calls to move away from it.
At the time, Google noted that it would pause the Flash content that it deemed wasn’t “important” to you, while still allowing you to watch the videos you wanted to see. A Chrome support moderator named “Ho” updated a feature request for Action Center support to “WontFix,” saying the following: “Thanks for the input and ideas!
And Flash has been often criticised for being a security concern in the way that it has previously been exploited to let people run malicious code on users’ computers. Stopping Flash content, like auto-playing advertisements, makes sense in today’s increasingly mobile world where web surfers are just as likely – if not more likely – to be surfing using an untethered laptop (or Chromebook!) to browse with Chrome as they are sitting at a desktop computer.
It would create a weird state where Chrome behaves differently on Win 10 than on Win 7/8 and developers of extensions/websites wouldn’t know what they design for. In January 2014, Chrome began displaying a speaker symbol on tabs that were playing sounds, so people could quickly identify where noises were coming from. Chrome’s settings already allow people to block such content, by heading to the settings and checking the “Detect and run important plugin content” option, which can be found in “Advanced settings”.
Adobe has been on an active campaign to move people onto new alternatives like Adobe Air, but the simplicity and compatibility of HTML5 have made it a losing battle. While Adobe in recent years has taken steps to improve Flash’s security with speedier updates and code reviews, it still is a widely used attack vector.
A few months ago, Chrome let you click on those speaker buttons to quickly mute the tabs. (You have to enable this feature by typing “chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting” into your browser and clicking “enable.”) Lest you think Chrome’s squashing of Flash content is a slight to Adobe, it’s worth pointing out that Google actually partnered with Adobe to develop the feature.
Firefox recently blocked Flash by default, and Chrome users will now actively have to choose to animate advertising content, which Chrome will “intelligently select”, according to Google. Microsoft’s native Calendar app removed Google Calendar support in Windows 8.1—though it returned in Windows 10—and in 2013 Google removed support for Sync, which threatened service for Exchange ActiveSync users with Windows Phones. (Google and Microsoft eventually hammered out an agreement to delay the shutdown until Windows Phone 8.1 added CalDAV and CardDAV support.) Google has also refused to release apps for its services on Windows Phone or in the Windows Store. In the post from earlier this summer, Google explained that the browser would now intelligently pause things like Flash animations on webpages, while allowing video content that’s more central to the page to run without interruption. Users will have the option to play the content, but they will need to adjust the browser’s settings to automatically play content requiring a Flash plugin. Chrome doesn’t actually use Adobe Flash, but rather renders using its own Pepper Flash plug-in, but it still doesn’t seem to think that safety can be assured.
The Chrome team’s refusal to embrace Action Center reeks of more of the same, especially since Google’s been stealthily sneaking Chrome OS in through Windows’ back door for a while now, but Ho provided some additional context in a follow-up comment after receiving some push-back: “To be clear, this is not a matter of just piping notifications to the OS for free. Google already converts Flash-based advertising content to HTML5, which allows certain types of videos to be played natively in Web browsers without additional software plugins. You can disable Flash from there — and it’s worth disabling anything else that you don’t use at the same time, because plugins can slow your computer down.
Chrome notifications allow to take actions right from the notifications, they come directly from an extension/website, they can require active dismissal, and so on. If you need to have it installed in your browser, then you can also install a plugin, such as Flash Control, that will prevent Flash from auto-playing. But with Chrome and Chromium derivatives now taking up a large chunk of market share, this could be a huge sea change not just for the browser, but for internet advertising as a whole. In addition, video game streaming service Twitch began moving away from the technology thanks to a redesign of its video player controls announced last month. For game developers, the concern is that browser makers will eventually stop supporting the technology altogether, meaning that tens of thousands of online games would stop working.
Though Microsoft’s OS does support actionable notifications, they would all appear as Chrome notifications in the Action Center, and Chrome developers would indeed need to put in extra work to support both Windows 10’s notifications and Chrome’s Windows 7 and 8 notifications. Chrome’s latest move to stop playing Flash content automatically isn’t exactly reaching that point yet, but it’s certainly a step in that general direction.
Here’s hoping Microsoft adds more granular notification options in the future so Chrome ditches its reluctance to Action Center—or reveals its hesitance as truly being pettiness.