Flash is on it’s way out – and most of us have come to accept this. HTML5 has offered a phenomenal replacement, and all of the recent security issues regarding Adobe Flash isn’t exactly making things better. We know that Google is looking to switch Chrome users from Flash to HTML5 by the end of 2016 – however news has now come out that Google has created a whitelist of 10 websites on which Flash will continue to function … for a year anyway.
The list, as of 05/16/2016, which can be revised by Google at anytime, is:
- YouTube.com
- Facebook.com
- Yahoo.com
- VK.com
- Live.com
- Yandex.ru
- OK.ru
- Twitch.tv
- Amazon.com
- Mail.ru
The whitelist will be in-effect for a year – giving everyone enough time to migrate their Flash applications and scripts to HTML5, and get used to a non-flash experience. In the original whitelist announcement Google’s Anthony LaForge stated:
Later this year we plan to change how Chromium hints to websites about the presence of Flash Player, by changing the default response of Navigator.plugins and Navigator.mimeTypes. If a site offers an HTML5 experience, this change will make that the primary experience. We will continue to ship Flash Player with Chrome, and if a site truly requires Flash, a prompt will appear at the top of the page when the user first visits that site, giving them the option of allowing it to run for that site (see the proposal for the mock-ups).
To reduce the initial user impact, and avoid over-prompting, Chrome will introduce this feature with a temporary whitelist of the current top Flash sites(1). This whitelist will expire after one year, and will be periodically revisited throughout the year, to remove sites whose usage no longer warrants an exception.