It can’t be too long now until Flash finally dies. Google has proposed a new “HTML5 by default” scheme that would mean that Flash is only used as a last resort by the browser.
Venture Beat reports that Google plans to switch to a new system for using Flash in Chrome as early as this spring. Instead of simply allowing it, the browser will preferentially try to use HTML5 if it can. If that doesn’t work, you’ll be asked if you’d like to use Flash or not — if you say yes, the browser will make it so and use Flash again for the site in the future.
Google plans to try and alleviate some of the prompt overload by shipping a white list of big-name sites — like, uh, Facebook and YouTube — that continue to use Flash, which won’t generate the prompts. But that whitelist will only last for a year.
It’s good news. Flash is awful: Insecure, irrelevant, a reminder of a bygone internet age. It’s time to stamp it out for good.
[Google via Venture Beat]