Google Chrome: Flash usage has dropped from 80% in 2014 to below 8% today
Google project director Parisa Tabriz delivered a keynote speech at the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium (NDSS) in San Diego last week sharing statistics on the decline in Flash numbers: at least one Chrome user per day loaded with Flash content pages About 80% in 2014 dropped below 8% in early 2018.
Tabriz is one of Google’s big guys responsible for Chrome security, and in the picture, she’s talking about the development of security features for Chrome and the Web platform.
Adobe will stop supporting Flash by the end of 2020
In fact, the demise of Flash is predictable. Adobe announced last year plans to discontinue Adobe Flash Media Player by the end of 2020.
However, despite the fact that Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and all other major browsers have changed the default Enabled Flash feature to click-to-use from last year, most industry experts are surprised to see Flash usage so quickly.
In theory, this sharp decline can be explained by the fact that most ad networks and video streaming portals have been moved from Flash to HTML5.
On the other hand, Flash’s market share – the number of computers with Flash installed – may still be very high. The 8% figure for Tabriz only means that few people are still using Flash to play web content, which is a good thing that allows the browser to remove the plug-in later.
Remove Flash completely in Chrome 87
For Chrome, Chrome 87, which is expected to be released by December 2020, will also completely remove Flash, in line with industry consensus with Adobe. December 2020 is the deadline for Adobe to stop releasing Flash updates, and other browsers will be removed by the time it is available. But before Chrome 87, Chrome users will go through a transition phase. In the current version of Chrome, Flash continues to run according to the click strategy. Starting with Chrome 76 – scheduled to be released in July 2019, Flash is disabled by default, meaning users must enable the plugin in their settings even after entering a click-to-run state.
Source: bleepingcomputer
