Google’s plan for phasing Flash out of Chrome entirely is just on the other side of the horizon as the search giant has just laid out their plan for the default rollout for HTML5 which they plan to implement very soon. How soon exactly is likely a thought that many may be thinking about, and luckily Google has given some insight here as to when the changes begin. According to the Chromium post, Chrome 55 stable will get these changes within the next few days, but only for about 1 percent of users, and for about half of users on Chrome 56 beta. All uses won’t begin to see the change HTML5 as default until February of next year with the stable version of Chrome 56.
These changes shouldn’t be a shock to anyone at this point, as Google has made numerous highlights on how they will be switching from flash support to HTML5. Back in August, for example, they made a statement saying that Chrome 55 would implement HTML5 as the default plugin in place of Flash. The Chrome 55 update for the Android app is already live, too, which means users on mobile will see these changes as well. Of course, users will still have the option to enable Flash if they like, but it will be on a site by site basis and they will need to indicate this when visiting a site that they want to view things in Flash instead of HTML5.
Beyond the default changes, Google notes that beginning in January, when users visit a site for the first time, they’ll see prompts that ask them to run flash, while a wide rollout of all websites in Chrome requiring a user indication to run flash in October of 2017. If you’re particularly unfamiliar with the reasons for the change, it all boils down to power efficiency and of course, security, or more specifically, a safer browsing experience, and Google is big on both efficiency and security so it was only a matter of time before the switch to HTML5 was ushered in. Although prompting to run Flash begins at the start of next year, Google is issuing the restrictions on using HTML5 as default slowly so as not to over-prompt users when they visit sites.