Dive Brief:
- Google said the first Chrome browser users have begun to see HTML5 by Default, according to a company blog post. The roll out to all users is expected to be completed by February.
- The move shouldn’t be a surprise for marketers as Google said it was coming months ago, but this feature disables Flash players, meaning marketers need to be prepared.
- Google is offering a number of tools and recommendations for developers and website managers with sites that use Flash to determine how the changes will affect those websites.
Dive Insight:
The long, slow death of Flash has been ongoing for over a year so marketers shouldn’t be caught by surprise as Google announced as far back as last summer that it was pausing Flash content in the Chrome browser. Around the same time Mozilla shut down Flash by default in its Firefox browser and Facebook’s security chief even asked for a “kill date” for the plug-in.
Google ended support for Flash display ads in July. Last month, Google said that support for new Flash video ads starts to disappear on April 3, 2017, and be done by July 3,2017.
Flash earned ire from major tech firms as it become outdated and a major security leak. At one point in time Flash dominated rich media ad inventory, but that shifted last year to HTML5 rich media around the time when Chrome and Firefox stopped automatically running Flash media.
Google’s latest announcement essentially puts the final, relatively quiet nail in Flash’s coffin.