Chrome 55 chooses HTML5 over Flash by default, drastically reduces RAM usage | Hacker News Reader

Chrome 55 chooses HTML5 over Flash by default, drastically reduces RAM usage

techspot.com

127 pointscpncrunch20 comments

This article is inaccurate. There is no Top 10 list.

According to the Google HBD plan, the browser uses the Site Engagement metric.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/106_KLNJfwb9L-1hVVa4i...

And site engagement is private to the person, so for the sites you visit frequently, it won't block/prompt initially, while other sites, it will.

Yes, the last page of that presentation says:

There is no longer any notion of a Whitelist for this feature The original proposal called for seeding the feature with a list of sites who had Flash usage above 1% (i.e. a “Top 10” list), to limit over-prompting. Instead we have updated our design to use Site Engagement to better tailor our enablement, of the feature, based on the browsing habits of the end user (i.e. it’s a reflection of the sites that they visit).

Seems to be disabled by default. I can enable the new behavior by going to chrome://flags/#prefer-html-over-flash, but when I set that flag to "default" Flash works the same as before.

Has Google confirmed this actually made it into Chrome 55? Their blog post[1] about the release doesn't mention it. One of the article's sources is from earlier this year, and the developer thread they link to has been quiet for about a month. I wonder if plans changed and they're leaving it behind a flag for now, or if they're A/B testing it somehow.

[1] https://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2016/12/stable-cha...

> An exception to this rule only applies to the top 10 websites that use Flash (and only for a year). Those sites are: YouTube.com, Facebook.com, Yahoo.com, VK.com, Live.com, Yandex.ru, OK.ru, Twitch.tv, Amazon.com and Mail.ru.

I think net neutrality is good for PR, but whenever they have to make a decision...

Why is twitch on there? They switched to entirely HTML5 a few months ago

Edit: And youtube? And Facebook? I have flash disabled (chrome://plugins) and haven't seen any issues on any of those sites.

You can turn the Twitch HTML5 player off. I had to do this on my laptop (chrome on macos) a few months ago because the HTML5 player was too unstable. Like, I didn't even know they had made the change, I was just losing my mind because I couldn't reliably watch stuff, and noticed it in the settings.

Yeah, kinda funny that youtube still uses flash. Then again I'm not all that surprised considering all the weird decisions Youtube makes.

Who and why are still using Flash?

google finance

Many BBC videos, if you don't use an iPad useragent.

They seem to have at least made iPlayer available without Flash now. That was a nice surprise.

most adult 'cam' sites. (cough allegedly)

NestCam

As ridiculous as it may sound, to display GIFs in Facebook :/

The New Zealand Government (Dec 1, 2016)

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5...

> They originally considered using HTML5 but opted for Flash because it was more likely to be commonly supported.

> "We also wanted as wide a range of users as possible to access these reports, so we opted for Flash instead," the spokesman said. "On balance Flash is best at this time."

v56 also cut memory consumption, it was so dramatic compared to v53 that it registered as an accounting change to my brain.

For a second I thought someone implemented a HTML5 renderer in Flash, thank god that's not the case...

Yes, I thought something similar.

"Chooses HTML5 over Flash" or "prefers HTML5 to Flash" might be better phrasing than "loads HTML5 over Flash"

Ok, s/load/choose/ it is.

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