The death knell for Flash has been sounding for awhile now, but it looks like Google is finally ready to pull the plug once and for all. Starting in September, Chrome will begin to "de-emphasize” Flash in favor of HTML5 with the ultimate goal of making HTML5 the only option for Chrome users by December. A recent post on the Chrome Blog explains their reasoning.

"Today, more than 90% of Flash on the web loads behind the scenes to support things like page analytics. This kind of Flash slows you down, and starting this September, Chrome 53 will begin to block it. HTML5 is much lighter and faster, and publishers are switching over to speed up page loading and save you more battery life. You’ll see an improvement in responsiveness and efficiency for many sites.”

Those of  us who cut our internet teeth back in the Flash heyday of the early 2000s might feel some nostalgic pains watching the platform die. Once upon a time, the Flash Player was responsible for video content and short clips that seemed positively futuristic compared to the static sites and cumbersome players that came before it. It seems silly now, but back in the day being able to watch a poorly animated cartoon or a 15 second fail clip in browser and with a decent resolution was remarkable. But, all things must end and the death of Flash will be a net positive for our collective internet experience. 

As a piece of software, Flash is well past its prime. Not only is it notoriously resource intensive and sluggish, it's also frequently posed a real security risk throughout its long lifespan. The platform is infamous for its security vulnerabilities and for holding the dubious distinction as one of the most common vectors for malicious code. HTML5 on the other hand is more lightweight and efficient, creating a snappier experience, and it's more secure to boot.

But what will this transition mean for the average end user? Well, not very much. The sky is not falling, you're not going to wake up tomorrow and find that suddenly half your favorite sites don't work. The actually effect on the typical users web experience will be fairly subtle. 

During the initial period of de-emphasization, the first time you visit a flash-intensive site you'll be met with a prompt to manually enable the plug-in. To avoid being a pestering drag however, Google has created a whitelist of the world's top sites that make heavy use of Flash that will skip the prompt for the first year. These sites include YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitch, and Amazon among others. This is about as gentle as a major change-over can get. 

Beyond that, Chrome will automatically select HTML5 whenever the option is available, a behind-the-scenes process that will be invisible to users. This is exactly how it should be. While the paradigm shift will obviously mean a bit of work for the web designers and engineers of the world, the goal in any kind of large scale transition should be a minimal impact on the user experience.

This would be a good time to review your own site though. If your site currently depends on a lot of Flash to operate, things are going to get rough over the next few months and traffic will dry up. You'll want to move to HTML5 or another solution as soon as possible. If you're unclear if your site uses Flash, there are a variety of helpful free scanning tools such as this one from SEO Site Check UP that will identify and list instances of Flash on your site.

Flash is dying, but it's not a violent death. More like it's drifting off peacefully in its sleep. Goodnight sweet prince.