Google’s plan to make Chrome’s Flash click-to-play

arstechnica.com

5 points·snake_case··3 comments

I recently got a Windows 10 laptop and decided not to install Flash, because this is 2016 and we should be over Flash by now.

Bad idea. Despite everyone's "death to flash" mantra, the same people banging the drum still rely on it.

I tried to load Google Play Music in Firefox. The site immediately tells me I need Flash. I tried going into my settings and enable the "Experimental HTML5 Player" in the labs section, but it was mysteriously greyed out.

I then tried Amazon Prime's music player to the same result: flash only.

The most surprising thing is that YouTube is on the list of domains to be excluded from this. While they've put in considerable effort into migrating away from Flash, it seems unfair for Google to enforce this policy on their smaller competitors while exempting their own property.

I can sort of see that as defensible from a UX point of view -- a lot of people will be unhappy if YouTube doesn't work in their browser, regardless of whether YouTube is owned by their browser's manufacturer. (If e.g. Edge broke YouTube, people would be rightly upset.)

I suppose a more defensible argument would be that the Chrome team trusts YouTube not to serve malicious Flash, but that doesn't seem to be what they're going for, since they're unconditionally allowing the top 10 Flash-using websites regardless of security history.

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